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The most inspirational military leader America ever had died in 1885 at age 63 from throat cancer caused by a lifelong cigar smoking habit. He was Ulysses S. Grant, perhaps the most popular military leader of his age and the general whose dogged and inspirational leadership kept our country from splitting into a regional confederation of squabbling states.

A failure at just about everything including soldiering, before the Civil War U.S. Grant would not have been selected as the most likely to succeed. After a mediocre record at West Point, wartime service as a provisioning officer during the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1848, and later having been sent to an isolated northern California outpost, Grant left the army ignominiously after being found drunk on duty. At the beginning of the Civil War, Grant was working with his father and brother in the father's store in Galena, Illinois, as a clerk when he was rescued from anonymity by the Governor of Illinois, who gave Grant a commission as brigadier general.

Grant was unique among leaders during the early years of the Civil War. He actually won battles, while at the same time recognizing that the struggle would be long and costly. His victories in the west at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg were bright spots in an otherwise dismal record of Union defeats or stalemate in the east. At Vicksburg, Grant succeeded in gaining Union control of the Mississippi and separating Texas from the Confederacy. It was those victories that prompted President Lincoln to summon Grant and take command of the Union armies.

Grant's best leadership quality was his consistent realistic assessment of what was required to save the Union from breakup: the defeat of the Confederate army. From the outset, Grant (and his trusted subordinate William Tecumseh Sherman) knew that time, manpower, and the industrial capacity of the North would eventually defeat the South. He was the first Union general to employ a coordinated strategy against southern armies. He sent Sherman and his tough band of Westerners south through Georgia and east to the seaport of Savannah, while at the same time closing on Lee's Army of Virginia. This coordinated strategy stretched the South's resources to the final breaking point. In the end, the South had nothing left to fight with.

Grant's Army of the Potomac also learned quickly that they had a new kind of leader. Marching south through the Virginia Wilderness, Grant was jumped by Lee and quickly discovered that he was

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