Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant spent the years before the Civil War failing at nearly everything he tried — farming, real estate, bill collecting — and had settled into clerking at his father's leather-goods shop in Galena, Illinois, when the war gave him back the only career he'd ever been good at. Within four years he rose from obscure colonel to general-in-chief of all Union armies, the man Abraham Lincoln finally trusted to fight without flinching. His terms were simple and merciless: unconditional surrender. The Confederates at Fort Donelson learned this in February 1862; Robert E. Lee learned it at Appomattox in April 1865.

Grant's presidency, 1869 to 1877, is the most underrated in American history — or was, until recent scholarship began rehabilitating it. He prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan with federal force, passing the Enforcement Acts and deploying the army to protect Black voters and officeholders across the South with an energy no president would match for nearly a century. His administration was also genuinely corrupt: the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the Whiskey Ring, and the Gold Panic of 1869 involved Grant associates at the highest levels, though Grant himself was never personally implicated in theft.

Grant spent his final years broke, swindled by a business partner, and dying of throat cancer. Mark Twain, his friend and publisher, urged him to write his memoirs. Grant finished the manuscript four days before he died in July 1885. The resulting Personal Memoirs — clear, unsparing, and written in pain — sold 350,000 copies and is still regarded as among the finest military autobiography in the English language. He died solvent, having secured his family's future, which was all he wanted.