Before the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was selling firewood on a St. Louis street corner and had pawned his gold watch to buy his children Christmas presents. Born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Ohio in 1822, he hated his father’s tannery, became known as a gifted horseman, and got his new name when a congressman wrote U.S. Grant on his West Point application. Assigned as an infantry quartermaster, he learned the supply work that later shaped his generalship, and in Mexico he hauled a mountain howitzer into a church belfry despite opposing the war.

After resigning in 1854, failing at farming at Hardscrabble, and clerking for his younger brothers in Galena, Grant rose from militia organizer to Union commander through river operations at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. As president he created the Department of Justice and used it with the Enforcement Acts against the Ku Klux Klan. The episode follows his bankruptcy, his race to finish his memoirs on Mount McGregor while dying of throat cancer, and how the Lost Cause movement recast him as a drunken butcher.

• In 1859 Grant freed William Jones, a man his father-in-law had given him, instead of selling him for a sum worth about $36,000 today.
• At Monterrey he carried a message through sniper fire while hanging off the side of his horse.
• James Longstreet, later a leading Confederate general, had been in Grant’s wedding party.
• Mark Twain offered Grant a 70 percent royalty in place of a magazine’s standard 10 percent.
• The finished memoirs earned his widow Julia more than $400,000.