Originally Posted: October 23, 2016
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” wrote William Shakespeare, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” wrote William Shakespeare, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
While the quote comes from his play Julius Caesar, it’s an apt description of the life of Ulysses S. Grant, another military hero who became his country’s leader.
In 1860, Grant was a clerk in his brother’s leather shop in Galena, Ill. Five years later, he commanded the nation’s largest army in its victory over the Confederacy. Three years after the Civil War ended, Grant began the first of his two terms as president of the United States.
When he died in 1885 at 63, Grant was grouped with Washington and Lincoln. His funeral in New York City drew 37,000 military marchers, throngs packing the 9½-mile parade route, and was marked by a coordinated bell-ringing across the country and even Mexico. The Grant National Memorial, opened in 1897 in New York’s Riverside Park, is the largest mausoleum in North America. An estimated 1 million attended the ceremonies.
However, U.S. Grant’s reputation has tarnished over the years, darkened by charges of alcoholism, incompetence and corruption. His Personal Memoirs, considered the best-written account by an American leader, gathers dust on library shelves today. READ MORE