Donnie Does History: Ulysses S. Grant, From Broke 2 Hero 2 Broke Again

I’ve been attempting to read the Ulysses S. Grant biography for about a year now. Will crush a few pages on my kindle whenever I get a chance but life uh…finds a way to stop me from reading.  I’ll forget to bring the kindle on long flights. I’ll decide to just listen to music on the subway so other people don’t think I’m a nerd. I’ll convince myself the Kindle is broken even though it’s just out of battery. I guess the universe would just prefer if I stuck to blogs about people in China being weirdos. Despite this adversity though I persevered and feel like I’ve finally gotten far enough through the book to drop some interesting tidbits about one of our most legendary yet controversial presidents.

- His real name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant but always just went by Ulysses because he was embarrassed that his initials spelt out HUG. One can only the imagine the brutal insults assholes of the 1800s would hurl at someone called  HUG. “Hey Hug! Why don’t you go HUG your mom you rump sniffer!”  Also, the “S” in his name was just the result of a typo made during his registration at West Point. He tried multiple times over the years to change it but was pretty much just told “sorry, too late. Better get used to it!” School administrators have sucked for centuries.
– He fought bravely in the Mexican American War and was one of the most skilled horsemen of his day. After the war, however, the military stationed him in the Pacific Northwest, which at that time was the same as being sent to the moon. To deal with the crippling isolation of being so far away from his family, he resorted to hitting the bottle. Which brings us to our next point.

– Grant was a drunk. Not a drunk in the sense of your one buddy who sometimes has too much to drink at the bars and tries to fight the bouncer. A drunk in the sense that if he ever consumed even so much as a drop of alcohol, it would be impossible to stop him from getting completely and utterly wasted to the point he couldn’t even walk or put together a coherent sentence. This condition, I believe they call it severe alcoholism, haunted him for his whole career. However, Grant managed to stay sober for most of his life and would only relapse on the booze at times when he was not around his family or knew for sure there was no threat of an impeding battle. His time in the Pacific Northwest fit both of those criteria though and he was reportedly asked to resign from the military as a result of drunken shenanigans.
– Upon returning to civilian life, he was by all accounts a complete and utter failure, having to eventually resort to selling firewood on St. Louis street corners to eke out a living. He built a tiny little farm on land given to him by his father-in-law that was so shitty he named it “HardScrabble.” One Christmas he was forced to pawn his watch for $22 just so he could afford to buy presents for his family. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a watch that cost more than $22, which in his day was probably $220, so at least he had that going for him.
- Grant’s own father was an ardent abolitionist while his father-in-law owned 20 slaves. When the Civil War broke out Grant sided with the Union while his wife’s entire family sided with the confederacy. His wife decided to stay by Grant’s side for the duration of the war while also trying to maintain a close relationship with her father. Plenty of people have less than ideal in-law situations but this one could take the cake
– Speaking of his wife, Julia Dent, she had a lazy eye. Not a KFC wannabe lazy eye, like a full fledged Riggs/Shaun Latham lazy eye.
In photos she would almost always turn her face to one side to hide her “condition”
which is really something Riggs and Shaun should try more often.
– The military was really the only place where Grant had ever excelled in life. Thus, when the Civil War broke out he was eager to rejoin the ranks. It’s important to note that at the beginning of the war, all the union generals out East were getting absolutely SPANKED by the confederates. Lincoln began to grow frustrated with the incompetency of these generals and decided to look to the war’s western theater for a savior. Out west, Grant was slowly moving up the ranks, eventually leading a force that captured Fort Donelson, giving the Union their first victory of the war. Grant preceded to win key battles for the Union at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga.
Despite coming at the cost of heavy casualties, this string of victories convinced Lincoln that Grant was the man for the job and he went on to entrust Grant with command of the entire Union military in 1864. That’s the beautiful thing about America. Grant was able to go from selling firewood on street corners to controlling an entire military in less than five years just because he knew how to do a little thing called Win. There isn’t much that Americans value much more than a good old W.
– No surprise here but Grant’s control of the military would eventually led to a union victory and the end of the Civil War with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox court house.
Many confederates would always had a soft spot for Grant as after Lee’s army surrendered he allowed the defeated men to take home their horses and mules to carry out the spring planting and provided Lee with a supply of food rations for his starving army. Grant’s military track record wasn’t flawless by any means though and people at the time labeled him a “butcher” due to the gross amount of casualties his armies endured, but the fact of the matter is that through his strategic planning and steadfastness, he  was able to accomplish what no other Union general was capable of.
– On a lighter note, Grant LOVED stogies. Guy would crush 12-20 cigars a day. Even in the midst of the battle, he would be cranking that thing. No surprise here but he ended up dying of throat cancer.

- Grant was supposed to be at the theater where Lincoln was assassinated and John Wilkes Boothe had every intention of killing him as well. However, Grant’s wife didn’t want to go as she’d have to spend time with Mrs. Lincoln who was by all accounts, quite a bitch.
-After the war Grant would go on two serve two terms as president of the re-united states of America. His reputation as president would be tarnished with scandals and accusations of corruption but from reading his biography here’s the way I see it. Grant always tried to do the right thing but was WAY too trusting of the people around him. He was notoriously easy to take advantage of as he was too pure at heart to realize that people often lie to get what they want.
He’d do a deal with someone based on what they told him, they’d proceed to go do real shady shit and the blame would fall back on him. This habit of his comes back to bite him in the ass in a MAJOR way later on in life. But first lets go to another fun fact
– While President, he was given a speeding ticket TWICE for riding his horse too fast down the streets of Washington D.C.
- Ok now remember how I said Grant had a horrible habit of trusting the wrong people? Well after leaving the presidency and returning to civilian life, he let himself get roped into one of the nation’s first ponzi schemes. This fancy fuck Ferdinand Ward, who at the time was hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Finance”, convinced Ulysses S. Grant and his son Buck to invest their life savings in wall-street investment firm called “Grant & Ward.” Ward then went on to use the power of Grant’s name to solicit investments from rich and powerful people all over the country. Even though he was a partner in the firm, Grant never once checked the books himself and as a result, when Ward told him the firm was mushrooming in size and he was now a very wealthy man, Grant had no reason not to believe him. Imagine if Bernie Madoff had a partner that was just completely in the dark about the scam he was running? That is someone who shouldn’t be working in finance. To make a long story short, the firm went belly-up, Ward went to jail, Grant’s reputation was irrefutably tarnished, and Grant as well as most of his extended family, became penniless overnight. To make matters worse, he got diagnosed with terminal throat cancer shortly after all this shit went down.
– Dying and with no money to speak of to leave his wife and family (president’s didn’t get pensions back then) he was running out of options. He probably would have started selling crystal meth at this point but it unfortunately hadn’t been invented yet.  Instead, he was talked into writing his memoirs as a way to make money and spent the last year of his life furiously pounding out 25-50 pages a day. He finished his manuscripts on July 19 1885, and died 5 days later.
The memoirs quickly became a best seller and made his family $450,000 (equivalent to $12,000,000 now), re-establishing their fortune.

And there you have it, the spark-notes life story of a remarkable yet flawed man. Many people believe Grant deserves just as much credit as Lincoln for keeping the union together and they wouldn’t be wrong. Not only was he the only general able to defeat the Confederates, he was also given the seemingly impossible task of re-introducing the southern states into the Union during his tenure as president while the wounds of the war were still extremely fresh. So lets have a toast to Grant, unless you’re a severe alcoholic like he was, in that case, mix in a water.