Two Weeks Grant example essay topic

Ulysses Hiram Grant was born April 27, 1822, in a two room frame house at Point Pleasant, Ohio. His father, Jesse Root Grant, was foreman in a tannery and a farmer. His mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, was a hard working frontier woman. When Ulysses was a year old, the family moved to Georgetown. There his father bought a farm, built a house, and set up his own tannery.

Jesse and Hannah had five more children there, two boys and three girls. Grant love horses and learned to manage them at an early age. When he was seven or eight he could drive a team and began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. From that point on until he reached seventeen, Grant did all the work done with horses; such as breaking up the land, furrowing, plowing corn, bringing in the crops when harvested, and hauling wood. Three months each winter when work was minimized Grant went to a one room schoolhouse, and that's how he was educated until he went to West Point at age seventeen.

When Grant turned seventeen, his father got him an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The congressman who made the appointment did not know Grants' full name, so he left out Hiram and added Simpson. Simpson, was Grants', mothers' maiden name. Grant did not care for military life and never expected to stay in the army. He was good in mathematics and hoped sometime to teach.

He was, however, the best horseman at the academy. He was Quiet, shy, and he made few friends. When he was commissioned, Ulysses was ordered to Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, Missouri. While stationed there he met Julia Dent, daughter of a slave owning Southern family. Within three months he proposed to her and was accepted.

Since he had only his pay as lieutenant, the wedding was postponed. Grant was in almost every battle of the Mexican War. He fought on foot, observing many different commanders and how they lead their troops. This experience, he said, was of great value to him, because he became acquainted with nearly all the officers of the regular army.

Some of them including the great soldier Robert E. Lee were to be on the Confederate side in the Civil War. Grant came back from Mexico a captain. He at once married Julia and took her to his new station, Sackett's Harbor, New York. During the Mexican War. This is where Grant formed the habit of drinking. At Sackett's Harbor he joined a temperance society, but he forgot the pledge the next year when he was sent to Detroit.

In 1852 Grant's regiment was ordered to the pacific coast by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Mrs. Grant stayed with her parents because she didn't want to take their two-year-old child on a trip like that. Cholera attacked the regiment in Panama. Grant showed great leadership and resourcefulness in getting the mules to carry the delirious men across the isthmus. He kept his cool and showed how he could lead men when times got rough.

Grant spent two years on the pacific coast. He missed Julia and wasn't there when his second child was born. He turned again to drink and wore slovenly uniforms. His colonel asked for his resignation, and Grant borrowed money to return him.

Julia's father gave Grant 80 acres to farm, near St. Louis. Grant called the place Hardscrabble. He cleared the land, built a log cabin, and worked hard but could not make farming pay. Two more children were born and Grant couldn't support his family. Grant sold his stock and implements and turned to selling real estate in St. Louis.

He failed again and walked the streets looking for something to do. Finally his father persuaded his younger sons to take Grant into their leather business at Galena, Illinois. Grant worked asa clerk, selling hides to saddle makers and cobbles. When the Civil War broke out he was 39 years old and was generally regarded as a failure. After Fort Sumter was fired on April 12, 1861, President Lincoln issued a call to arms. Within two weeks Grant was drilling volunteers in Galena, because, as he said, there was no one else to do the job.

He went with the volunteers to Springfield, Illinois, wearing his threadbare citizen's clothes. At Springfield, the governor made him first a clerk, then a mustering officer. When the gathering was completed Grant left. A few weeks later the governor telegraphed him to come back and accept the rank of colonel because the men he had recruited had asked for him. Officers were expected to supply their own uniform and horse, but Grant didn't have either one. Still, he enforced discipline on the rough farm youths and in a month had a trained regiment.

He marched his men into Missouri, and in St. Louis he read in a newspaper that he had been made a brigadier general of volunteers. Grant reached his headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, September 4, 1861. Two days later, without firing a shot, he occupied Paducah, Kentucky. In November his raw recruits made an unsuccessful attack on a Confederate camp at Belmont, Missouri.

Grant then set to work to prepare his men for a long, hard struggle. Volunteers poured in until he had nearly 20,000 men. In February 1862 Grant advanced into Tennessee. With the aid of Commodore Foote's gunboats, he captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Then he moved against the more formidable Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River. While he was invading this fort, the Confederate general, Simon B. Buckner asked for a truce.

This was the same officer who in had loaned Grant money to rejoin his family in 1858. Grant's answer became famous in American history: 'No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works. Buckner surrendered the fort with 14,000 prisoners. Newspapers in the North were filled with praise of Unconditional Surrender Lincoln named him a major general. The objective of the campaign in the West was to cut the Confederacy in two by winning the Mississippi Valley.

The first major success came during 1862 in the battle of Shiloh in southern Tennessee. In two days of desperate fighting, Grant pushed the Confederate forces back to Corinth in Mississippi. Losses on both sides were heavy. Grant made no excuses but spent the rest of 1862 making plans to take Vicksburg, the stronghold on the Mississippi River that served as a major transportation point for the Confederacy. Vicksburg was a brilliant operation and showed Grant at his best.

The fort surrendered unconditionally on July 4, 1863, a day after the battle of Gettysburg. Five days later Port Hudson fell. As a reward for his victory at Vicksburg, Grant was given supreme command of all the armies in the West. When he returned to Tennessee, he set out to relieve a Federal army penned up in Chattanooga. The Confederates occupied Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, those two locations were the only things in the way approaching the city. On November 24 and 25, the Federal troops stormed the heights, and the Confederates fled.