![]() He was unable to stem the rampant corruption that plagued his administration and failed to combat a severe economic depression in 1873. Grant’s talent as political leader paled woefully in comparison to his military prowess. The victory solidified Grant’s status as national hero and, in 1869, he began his first of two terms as president. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. As supreme commander of Union forces, Grant led troops in a series of epic and bloody battles against Confederate General Robert E. In March 1864, Lincoln revived the rank of lieutenant general-a rank that had previously been held only by George Washington in 1798-and gave it to Grant. The Union Army had suffered under the service of a series of incompetent generals and Lincoln was in the market for a new Union supreme commander. In 1863, after leading the Union Army to victory at Vicksburg, Grant caught President Abraham Lincoln’s attention. After the Donelson campaign, Grant received over 10,000 boxes of congratulatory cigars from a grateful citizenry. In 1862, Grant led troops in the captures of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, and forced the Confederate Army to retreat back into Mississippi after the Battle of Shiloh. Instead, he re-enlisted in the Army in 1861 and embarked on a stellar military career, although his tendency to binge-drink re-emerged and he developed another unhealthy habit: chain cigar-smoking, which probably caused the throat cancer that eventually killed him. If it were not for the Civil War, Grant might have slipped quickly into obscurity. Although he kicked the alcohol habit, he failed miserably at both vocations and was forced to take a job as a clerk in his father’s tanning business. He did, and returned to Missouri to try his hand at farming and land speculation. By 1854, Grant’s alcohol consumption so alarmed his superiors that he was asked to resign from the Army. The loneliness and sheer boredom of duty in the West drove Grant to binge drinking. Though Grant later admitted in his memoirs that he had no interest in the military apart from honing his equestrian skills, he graduated in 1843 and went on to serve first in the Mexican-American War, which he opposed on moral grounds, and then in California and Oregon, tours of duty that forced him to leave behind his beloved wife and children. The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining his father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at West Point in 1839. On July 23, 1885, just after completing his memoirs, Civil War hero and former president Ulysses S.
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