On April 16, 1861, a citizens' meeting was held at the courthouse in Galena, Illinois. The townspeople, tense and angry, gathered to discuss the news that had shocked the nation—American guns had fired on the American flag at Fort Sumter.

Seated in the back of the hall was an inconspicuous man about forty years old. He had lived in Galena for less than a year and had spent a good part of that time traveling as a salesman for a leather-goods store. Few of his neighbors knew that he was a West Point graduate and a hero of the Mexican War. The man's name was Ulysses S. Grant.

After the meeting was over, Grant said to his brother, "I think I ought to go into the service." Within a few months the ex-captain was a brigadier general in the Union Army; less than eight years later Ulysses S. Grant was elected eighteenth President of the United States.

This book traces Grant's life from boyhood to West Point days; from the years of discouragement as a farmer and businessman to his triumphs as a brilliant Civil War general; from his difficult post-war presidency through the years following his retirement from public life. It is the story of the military man who hated war and of his struggle to achieve a lasting peace.

It sheds new light on Grant and his era, particularly the crucial postwar period. He had learned from personal experience with both the loyal Negro soldier and the civilian of the South the importance of justice as a basis for peace.

It is also the story of a nation's aspirations as revealed in the personality of one of its great leaders who wrote, at the end of his life: 

"I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to ...the universal kindly feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would be my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to "Let Us Have Peace."

From the dust jacket