Ulysses S. Grant has been remembered as a butcher general and a corrupt president — and both reputations are largely wrong. The man who won the Civil War and served two terms in the White House was a far more complex and capable figure than a century of Lost Cause mythology allowed. Modern historians have been steadily restoring Grant to his rightful place as one of America’s most consequential leaders.

This episode reexamines Grant’s legacy, from his struggles with poverty and alcohol through his military genius in the Western Theater and the Overland Campaign, to a presidency defined by civil rights enforcement and Reconstruction that later generations deliberately erased.

• Grant’s pre-war failures and the unlikely path from leather shop clerk to commanding general
• The military campaigns — Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Overland Campaign — that won the war
• His presidency’s aggressive enforcement of civil rights and fight against the Ku Klux Klan
• How Lost Cause mythology distorted Grant’s reputation for over a century