General-in-Chief of all Union armies during the Civil War

Known as "Unconditional Surrender Grant"

18th President of the United States

(1822-1885) Graduated in the West Point class of 1843, and fought in the Mexican War where he earned two accomodations for gallantry. During the Civil War, he fought at the battles of Belmont, Missouri; Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh, Tennessee; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Chattanooga, Tennessee; the 1864 Overland campaign; the battle of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, the siege of Petersburg, Virginia; and in the 1865 Appomattox campaign in which Grant's army forced the surrender of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He was the Commander-in-Chief of all Union armies, from 1863-65. General Grant earned the acclaim of the nation, and the sobriquet, "Unconditional Surrender Grant" after forcing the surrender of Fort Donelson, in February 1862. He served two terms as the 18th President of the United States, 1869-77. After a year-long struggle with throat cancer, surrounded by his family, Ulysses S. Grant died at his Mount McGregor cottage, in New York state, on July 23, 1885, at the age of 63, having just finished his written memoirs less than a month before his death. General Philip H. Sheridan, then Commanding General of the U.S. Army, ordered a day-long tribute to Grant on all military posts, and President Grover Cleveland ordered a thirty-day nationwide period of mourning. After private services, the honor guard placed Grant's body on a special funeral train, which traveled to U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and to New York City. A quarter of a million people viewed it in the two days before the funeral. Tens of thousands of men, many of them Union veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic, marched with Grant's casket drawn by two dozen black stallions to Riverside Park, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. His pallbearers included Union Generals William T. Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, and John A. Logan, the head of the GAR, Confederate Generals Simon B. Buckner and Joseph E. Johnston, and Union Admiral David D. Porter. Following the casket in the seven-mile-long procession were President Cleveland, two former presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester B. Arthur, all of the president's cabinet, as well as the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Attendance at the New York funeral topped 1.5 million. Ceremonies were held in other major cities around the country, while Grant was eulogized in the press and likened to Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Grant's body was laid to rest in Riverside Park, first in a temporary tomb, and then—twelve years later, on April 17, 1897, in the elaborate General Grant National Memorial, also known as "Grant's Tomb," the largest mausoleum in North America.

Wet, plate albumen carte de visite photograph, mounted to 2 3/8 x 4 card. Standing view in uniform as Lieutenant General with mourning ribbon visible on his frock coat sleeve. Imprint on the front mount, "Lieut. Gen. U.S. Grant." No back mark. Light age toning and wear. Very fine and desirable view of "Sam" Grant, as he was known to his friends.