Ulysses S. Grant 201st Birthday: An Underrated President

Today marks the 201st birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, who was born this day in 1822. Much respected and beloved in his own day, Grant’s reputation has only recovered in the past decade or so from a lengthy campaign to deride his generalship and trash his presidency.

I defended Grant in 2020 from the cancel-culture mobs (including Nikole Hannah-Jones, who compared the man who held the sword of emancipation to Osama bin Laden), and I wrote a two–part series in 2019 on the many aspects of his presidency. Grant was as great a general as this nation ever produced: While his opposite number, Robert E. Lee, was a student of Napoleon and an expert in tactics and psychology, Grant was a forward-looking innovator. He used steam gunboats to take Forts Henry and Donelson, and considering how he combined tempo and the movement of multiple simultaneous armies to hound Lee into Petersburg in the spring of 1864, he is arguably the father of the operational art of strategy. Never as glamorous as Lee, Grant mastered more-mundane arts: J. F. C. Fuller’s 1932 study Grant and Lee explored how Grant (a former quartermaster) outclassed Lee in keeping his army supplied and in giving clear, written orders during battle. His Vicksburg campaign was a complex and audacious masterpiece.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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Today marks the 201st birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, who was born this day in 1822. Much respected and beloved in his own day, Grant’s reputation has only recovered in the past decade or so from a lengthy campaign to deride his generalship and trash his presidency.

I defended Grant in 2020 from the cancel-culture mobs (including Nikole Hannah-Jones, who compared the man who held the sword of emancipation to Osama bin Laden), and I wrote a two–part series in 2019 on the many aspects of his presidency. Grant was as great a general as this nation ever produced: While his opposite number, Robert E. Lee, was a student of Napoleon and an expert in tactics and psychology, Grant was a forward-looking innovator. He used steam gunboats to take Forts Henry and Donelson, and considering how he combined tempo and the movement of multiple simultaneous armies to hound Lee into Petersburg in the spring of 1864, he is arguably the father of the operational art of strategy. Never as glamorous as Lee, Grant mastered more-mundane arts: J. F. C. Fuller’s 1932 study Grant and Lee explored how Grant (a former quartermaster) outclassed Lee in keeping his army supplied and in giving clear, written orders during battle. His Vicksburg campaign was a complex and audacious masterpiece.