Ulysses S. Grant

Born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Ohio in 1822, he graduated West Point in 1843, distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War, then returned to civilian life broke by 1854. The Civil War pulled him back: victories in the western theater in 1862, the Vicksburg campaign that gave the Union the Mississippi in 1863, promotion to command all Union armies after Chattanooga, and finally the Overland Campaign that ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865. A war hero drawn in by duty, he won the presidency in 1868 and spent two terms stabilizing the economy, enforcing Reconstruction, signing the Fifteenth Amendment, creating the Justice Department, and breaking the Ku Klux Klan - before executive scandals and the Panic of 1873 swamped his second term. He left office in 1877, circumnavigated the globe, failed to win a third nomination in 1880, and in 1885, impoverished and dying of throat cancer, wrote memoirs that became a critical and financial triumph published just after his death.