Ulysses S. Grant

In the spring of 1861 Ulysses S. Grant was working in his family's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. He had resigned from the army seven years earlier under a cloud, failed at farming, failed at real estate, and taken a job from his younger brothers because nothing else was available. He was thirty-nine.

Four years later he commanded every Union soldier under arms. What set him apart was not brilliance in the Napoleonic sense but an unusual steadiness — an ability to keep his nerve on the second day of a battle that had gone badly on the first, and a refusal to be paralysed by what the enemy might do to him. He wrote in his memoirs that he had learned, early on, that the man across the field was just as frightened of him.

He was untidy, quiet, disliked ceremony and military music, and could not stand the sight of blood in his food. Lincoln, pressed by people demanding Grant's removal after Shiloh, gave the reply that settled it: I cannot spare this man. He fights.