In the spring of 1861, Grant was thirty-nine and going nowhere — a former Army officer clerking in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, supervised by younger brothers. Then Fort Sumter happened. Within four years he would win the Civil War. Within eight he would be president. And in his final months, dying of throat cancer, he would race against death to complete the military memoir Mark Twain called the finest in the English language.

This is the full arc of Ulysses S. Grant — Civil War general, Reconstruction president, and the most consequential civil rights champion in American history before the mid-twentieth century. Harriet Jane Lockwood follows Grant across twenty-four chapters: from the Mexican War bayonet charge at Monterrey through the 47-day siege of Vicksburg to the McLean farmhouse at Appomattox, where Lee arrived in full dress uniform and Grant in muddy field clothes without his sword.

Inside this Civil War and Reconstruction history:

• The Vicksburg campaign — 200 miles, five battles in seventeen days, the garrison eating mules and rats before 29,000 men surrendered on July 4, 1863 (Chapter 5)
• Appomattox's generous terms — why Grant paroled Lee's survivors rather than imprison them, and how Lincoln shaped those terms aboard the River Queen (Chapter 8)
• The Fifteenth Amendment — Grant celebrating ratification as "the greatest civil change" since the nation's founding (Chapter 9)
• Destroying the Ku Klux Klan — habeas corpus suspended in nine South Carolina counties, 500+ federal indictments, and the campaign historian Allen Trelease called the destruction of the first Klan as an organized force (Chapter 10)
• Black Friday and the Whiskey Ring — Jay Gould's gold corner of 1869 and Treasury Secretary Bristow's undercover investigation (Chapters 13, 15)
• Grant rehabilitated — the twenty-first-century reassessment, and the civil rights legacy deferred ninety years until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Chapter 24)

The man who fought the Klan, ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, and paroled 29,000 Confederate soldiers was neither the butcher his critics claimed nor the naive figurehead his scandals implied — but a president whose achievements were ultimately defeated by forces stronger than any single administration could overcome.

For readers of Ron Chernow's GRANT and James McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.