PBS American Experience - Ulysses S. Grant Warrior, President (2002)

As a general, he had fought to preserve the Union. As president, he helped to oversee the transformation from union to nation. As a former president, he was the embodiment of the very idea of national union, and of America's entry onto the world stage. As a dying general, he was the symbol of the nation's greatest and most traumatic war. The story of Ulysses S. Grant's life, from his first days on the Ohio frontier to his last days out-writing death in the Adirondacks, is an endlessly fascinating one. The greatest hero of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was a brilliant military strategist whose ruthlessness in battle won him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender”. His victory at Vicksburg, which irrevocably changed the course of the war, won him the admiration of the North and the undying respect of Abraham Lincoln. Grant was a leader for whom thousands of Northern soldiers were willing to fight and die, and for whom thousands did. Perhaps most memorably, he was the general who took Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and the author of its generous terms for peace. The story of Grant's record in the White House is less triumphant. For two terms, as his presidency was rocked by scandal and economic depression, Grant struggled to define the meaning of the war he had fought so hard to win, and the Union he had fought to preserve. While not overlooking Grant's many failings, this film reappraises Grant's career, from his pre-Civil War days as a failed soldier haunted by rumours of drunkenness, to his last hours, when he raced to finish his war memoirs as he was dying of cancer. It argues that the 18th president was an honorable man, who tried to keep promises made to African Americans and who managed to keep the country together in the face of deep divisions.

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