Warriors are not always allowed their wars. Within the conflicts they flourish; outside of them, the qualities that make them supreme on the battlefield are often useless.

Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio; a typical midwestern community along the broad river that separates north from south. He was a quite boy and apparently devoid of the ambition that drove his father to success. It was that same trait with which dishonest men pursue their objectives without regard for consequences. Grant was not ambitious in that sense and many years later when he became president, he failed to understand that the ruthless drive to acquire is never tempered by integrity.

In 1843, at the age of 21, Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point under indifferent circumstances. He ranked 21 out of a class of 39, excelling only in mathematics, drawing, and horsemanship. Most cadets agree that no one could sit a horse like Grant. Somewhere along the line he dropped Hiram, considered Ulysses his first name, and threw S. in the middle. There are numerous theories for the name change; the “s” stood for Simpson, his mother’s middle name; he preferred not to have his luggage stamped with the initials HUG; or, a clerk made a mistake. It really doesn’t make any difference—later on the U.S. stood for Unconditional Surrender, United States, or Uncle Sam; trite mechanisms that reporters use to flavor a story. West Point was not a pleasant experience for Grant and later he would describe the period as “interminable.”

As a young officer he met and married Julia Boggs Dent. He has little to offer, as a second lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry his prospects are limited, but the two are very much in love and she provided unwavering support to the quiet man. Two years after the marriage he fought in the Mexican War. It is a remarkable engagement for the small American army, which, despite the controversy surrounding the legality of the conflict, provided experience for soldiers who would later face each other in the Civil War. The roster of Mexican War veterans is a litany of famous names. Grant could not be faulted for not having out-shown this galaxy.

The Grants enjoyed four years of companionship before he was sent to Humboldt Bay, California. Grant eased the boredom and tedium of the peacetime army, and the separation from his family, by drinking. He was also at odds with his commanding officer who finally suggested that the best thing that Grant could do is resign from the military. He did so at virtually the same time that he was promoted to captain. It was more than the drinking—Grant was miserable without his family around him.

For the next seven years, Grant wandered in the wilderness. He farmed, became a landlord, chopped wood, and finally moved to Galena, Illinois where he became a clerk in his father’s store. Julia and the children were the most important part of his life and despite his failures; he could always count on their presence. He could have drifted, unabated, into shabbiness, a round-shouldered creature, pitied by those who had achieved success, were it not for a national crisis.

Dump the issues on the table and sort through them—state’s rights, slavery, and sectional differences; and choose the one that best satisfies your reason that the nation turned on itself. The early morning bombardment of Fort Sumter launched America into a disastrous civil war and at the moment salvation came to Ulysses S. Grant.

“He was plain, very plain,” the governor of Illinois later recalled upon beholding the man who would become the colonel of the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He probably had some doubts that this unassuming man could control a regiment that had a reputation of being “hellions.” What Grant knew, perhaps instinctively or because he thought out the situation in that complex mind of his, was that volunteers were just recently removed from civilians. He reckoned that they were just “as smart as town folks,” and he took a common sense approach to teaching them the qualities of good soldiering. The men appreciated that. They had disdain for martinets and endless drilling, and they would come to the easy sort of discipline that Grant required with a firm hand. There were a few incidents;one account had the slight colonel knocking down and sitting on a drunken soldier, but another more reliable account had Grant staring down a bully. It was that look that most soldiers remembered. That no-nonsense glint in the eyes that one soldier recalled: “he looks as if he can drive his head through a brick wall and was just about to do it.” Resolute, unyielding, determined, inevitable. These traits were certainly Grant’s but there was another, darker, more human motive behind his approach—he dare not fail again. Whether that thought was clear in his mind, or was hidden too deeply to be recognized, it would not be surprising if it existed. He had a chance to succeed at something that he knew about—being a soldier. He could not go back, nor would he want too. He had traveled that path and found it barren of reward. This war, these soldiers, promised opportunity.

He was closer to soldiers than he was officers, although he was not particularly familiar with either. Maybe he had suffered too much at the hands of superior men, but more likely it was because that common sense said that officers should be accountable to and for their men, and he made that happen, much to the delight of the enlisted men. “All officers not reported sick, or otherwise excused by the competent authority, will attend all Drills and Parades,” Grant ordered. He saw, clearly, what many commanding officers failed to see; the men would not fight for leaders that they did not respect. He was tough and fair, and the officers and men of the 21st Infantry knew that when Colonel Grant said something, he meant it.

Grant marched the 21st into Missouri where two unexpected events occurred; Grant found himself with a case of nerves, and he was promoted. One had nothing to do with the other, of course.

Grant and the regiment were sent after a local rebel guerilla whose band of marauders had been causing havoc in the area. The closer Colonel Grant and his newly minted and untested regiment got to the enemy force, the more Grant doubted his “moral courage.” In fact, he was to write later, he wanted very much to be back in Illinois. The enemy commander apparently had the same concerns, but unlike Grant, took council of his fears. He fled. U. S. Grant learned a valuable lesson and despite some tense times with the Army of the Potomac, never let fear control his actions.

Sometime after his first victory, the regimental chaplain informed Grant that he had been named a brigadier general. Grant “allowed” as how this was probably due to the behind the scenes maneuvering of some Illinois friends of his, thanked the chaplain for the news, and wandered off. He had been a colonel for a month and was now a general; took a group of hellions and made them soldiers; and found that fear was a natural and controllable response to uncertainty. Not bad for a man who had to chop wood to support his family.

Belmont, Missouri sits across the Mississippi River from Columbus, Kentucky. Neither town had any significance before the war but now they were vitally important because of where they were situated. There were a half-dozen of these steamboat landings scattered along the great river: Bird’s Point, Norfolk, and Cairo, a disagreeable place according to General John C. Fremont, but one whose strategic importance could not be ignored. Things on the Kentucky side of the river had to be handled especially carefully—the government of the Bluegrass State had supposed it could maintain a strange sort of neutrality in the midst of civil war. That notion would soon disappear as completely as the prophecy by some that this war between states would be a short-lived, bloodless conflict.

U. S. Grant and his regiment were sent to Belmont in mid-November, 1861, to attack the Confederate force encamped there. Rebel General Leonidas Polk, sensing that Grant’s action might be a feint, had dispatched enough troops to Belmont so that the sides were roughly equal--2,700 men each. There were green troops on each side with the officers offering very little in the way of experience, but the Federals managed to drive the rebel forces out of their camp after some sharp fighting. What happened next strangely foreshadowed the battle that almost ended Grant’s career.

The union troops, flushed with apparent victory, began ransacking the camp and celebrating. Grant recognized that the battle was far from finished and tried desperately to rally his volunteers. But these men didn’t have the edge of veterans yet and all they saw was an enemy camp that was rightly theirs and open to looting. The Confederate forces quickly regrouped, and it was suddenly obvious to Grant’s soldiers that they were cut off from the transports that had brought them down the river to this place. Some of the officers insisted that surrender was the only option left to them but Grant stated bluntly that they had cut their way in and now they could cut their way out. They did, managing a successful but clumsy escape that could hardly be called anything but a retreat. Ironically the two gunboats that accompanied Grant’s transports were the Tyler and the Lexington. These two vessels would come to Grant’s rescue in Tennessee.

Grant rode his horse down a plank to the transport, the last one to leave a hotly contested field. During the somber trip back to Cairo he said very little to anyone. One officer recalled that he thought Grant was “hard-hearted, cold, and indifferent,” but realized later that the commanding officer’s manner “was only the difference between a real soldier and amateur soldiers.”

There was a lot of that going around—amateurs turning into professionals. What had happened at Belmont was fortunate for Grant and his troops because it showed them the folly of abandoning discipline in the face of the enemy. War is a serious business, a deadly business. The marching, camping, parading, and drilling that came with being soldiers-in-training leads eventually to the soldier’s mission: to fight the enemy.

Over 600 of Grant’s force were listed as killed, wounded, or missing. The horrible thing is that the number seems laughably small in comparison to the number of men that Grant would lose in later battles. What did emerge from Belmont is the image of the unflustered, calm and courageous general, seemingly oblivious to Minie balls buzzing all around him, directing his troops. Grant had found his purpose in life.