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the Union armies. Sharing headquarters with General George Meade's Army of the Potomac, he swung south of Richmond, pursuing Robert E. Lee for ten months with unrelenting force to Appomattox, which finally ended the war. At the same time, other armies under Grant's direction had torn the Confederacy apart.

After the war, Grant was put in charge of the military aspects of Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson forced him to replace Edward Stanton as Secretary of War in his fight with the Radical Republicans. Grant became the Republican Party's nominee for president in 1868. When he entered the White House, he was politically inexperienced and the youngest man (46) at the time to be elected President. He served two terms and although he was basically an honest man, his administration couldn't have been more corrupt, especially in terms of scandals involving the Whiskey tax and Indian agents. Although he did his best to maintain peace with the Indians, the massacre of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry occurred during his Presidency.

Presidential historians generally rate Grant in the lowest quartile because of the widespread political and financial corruption that he tolerated even though he did not profit from any of it. Today scholars are a lot kinder, recognizing his political naivet and his administration's support of civil rights, particularly for the African Americans but also for other minority groups.

No matter what his strengths or weaknesses, our eighteenth president, Ulysses Simpson Grant was a brilliant, fearless general and military strategist whose courage and leadership helped to win the most tragic war in American history, which helped to define America both as a nation and as a people.

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