surrender, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and he was elected by
an overwhelming majority. For the first time in the history of the
country, a man had been elected President without regard to his
qualifications for the office, for even Jackson had had many years'
experience in public affairs. Of such qualifications, Grant had very
few. He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in
statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance. As a result, his
administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in
a swirl of scandal.

Born in Ohio in 1822, and graduated at West Point, he had served through
the war with Mexico, resigned from the army, remained in obscurity for
six years, during which he made an unsuccessful attempt to support
himself in civil life, and entered the army again at the outbreak of the
Civil War. From the first he was successful more than any other of the
Union generals, not so much because of military genius as from a certain
tenacity of purpose with which he fairly wore out the enemy. But a
people discouraged by reverses were not disposed to inquire too closely
into the reason of his victories, and early in 1864, after a brilliant
campaign along the Mississippi, he had been appointed commander-in-chief
of the Union army, and began that series of operations against Richmond
which cost the North so dear, but which resulted in the fall of the
capital of the Confederacy and in Lee's surrender.

A bearded, square-jawed, silent man, he caught the public fancy by two
messages, the one of "Unconditional surrender," with which he had
answered the demand for terms on the part of the Confederates whom he
had entrapped in Fort Donelson; the other, the famous: "I propose to
fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer," with which he
started his campaign in the Wilderness. Both were characteristic, and if
Grant had retired from public life at the close of the Civil War, or had
been content to remain commander-in-chief of the army of the United
States, his fame would probably have been brighter than it is to-day.

His training, such as it was, had been wholly military and his inaugural
address showed his profound ignorance of the work which lay before
him--an ignorance all the more profound and unreachable because of his
serene unconsciousness of it. He fell at once an easy prey to political
demagogues, and before the close of his first administration,
demoralization was widespread