Portal:Ohio/Selected Biography/8
Ulysses S. Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant, was an American general and the eighteenth President of the United States (1869–1877). He achieved international fame as the leading Union general in the American Civil War.
In 1868, Grant was elected president as a Republican. Grant was the first president to serve for two full terms since Andrew Jackson forty years before. He led Radical Reconstruction and built a powerful patronage-based Republican party in the South, with the adroit use of the army. He took a hard line that reduced violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Although Grant was personally honest, he not only tolerated financial and political corruption among top aides but also protected them once exposed.