Today marks the 201st birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, who was born this day in 1822. Much respected and beloved in his own day, Grant’s reputation has only recovered in the past decade or so from a lengthy campaign to deride his generalship and trash his presidency.

I defended Grant in 2020 from the cancel-culture mobs (including Nikole Hannah-Jones, who compared the man who held the sword of emancipation to Osama bin Laden), and I wrote a two–part series in 2019 on the many aspects of his presidency. Grant was as great a general as this nation ever produced: While his opposite number, Robert E. Lee, was a student of Napoleon and an expert in tactics and psychology, Grant was a forward-looking innovator. He used steam gunboats to take Forts Henry and Donelson, and considering how he combined tempo and the movement of multiple simultaneous armies to hound Lee into Petersburg in the spring of 1864, he is arguably the father of the operational art of strategy. Never as glamorous as Lee, Grant mastered more-mundane arts: J. F. C. Fuller’s 1932 study Grant and Lee explored how Grant (a former quartermaster) outclassed Lee in keeping his army supplied and in giving clear, written orders during battle. His Vicksburg campaign was a complex and audacious masterpiece.

Here’s small story from Grant’s autobiography, which is rightly revered as a classic because, and not in spite, of Grant’s wry, matter-of-fact, unliterary delivery. Early in 1861, Grant had to train men newly under his command and went looking for a manual on tactical commands. He hadn’t been at a battalion drill since being given his quartermaster’s job 15 years earlier, and a new manual had been adopted since the replacement of the flintlock musket with the rifle. He says,

While I was at West Point the tactics used in the army had been Scott’s and the musket the flint lock. I had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my graduation. My standing in that branch of studies had been near the foot of the class. . . . I perceived at once, however, that [the new manual] was nothing more than common sense and the progress of the age applied to Scott’s system. The commands were abbreviated and the movement expedited. Under the old tactics almost every change in the order of march was preceded by a ‘halt,’ then came the change, and then the ‘forward march.’ With the new tactics all these changes could be made while in motion. I found no trouble in giving commands that would take my regiment where I wanted it to go and carry it around all obstacles. I do not believe that the officers of the regiment ever discovered that I had never studied the tactics that I used.

Pragmatic, more interested in results than in studying the doctrine: This was Grant. Hardened by many failures in life, he had endless reserves of resiliency, hence his famous exchange with Sherman after the bloody first day at Shiloh. Sherman: “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant, between puffs of his cigar: “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow though.”

Grant was also a gravely underrated president and a crucial figure in the history of the Republican Party. The second Republican president and the first to serve out two full terms, he did much to define the party’s identity and personality. Abraham Lincoln was a shrewd political wire-puller and an ideological man, the sort who thought out the philosophy of what he did. Grant, by contrast, was blunt, practical, instinctively conservative and nationalist, a firm defender of law and order, and profoundly Midwestern in his outlook. The legacies of Lincoln and Grant represent the two fundamental currents within the party ever since.

Grant deplored the Confederate cause — “that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” — and rejected the right of secession. As he wrote in his memoirs, “individuals might ignore the constitution; but the Nation itself must not only obey it, but must enforce the strictest construction of that instrument.” He created the Department of Justice to crush the Klan. Today, as Donald Trump faces criminal charges, we are reminded that Grant, while president, was once arrested for speeding in his carriage — by a black police officer who was a former slave yet felt secure enough in his role as an officer of the law to arrest the president himself:

Police Officer William West, a Civil War veteran, informed President Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

Grant replied, “All right, where do you wish me to go with you?”

West told him the “station house.” At President Grant’s invitation, West rode to the station house in the President’s carriage, where the President asked about West’s experiences during the war. Grant informed West that he admired a man who “did his duty” and he assured him he would not get into trouble for arresting the president.

At the station, Grant paid $20 ($500 today) and stayed long enough to be amazed at the irate protests of some of his prominent speeding companions upon their arraignments. Days later, hearing that some of Grant’s fellow racers were threatening West’s job, Grant made good on his promise to West by writing the chief of police and commending West for his fearlessness and integrity.

In the abortion debate, when Joe Biden defies the federal Comstock Act (which bans sending abortion drugs through the mail), we are likewise reminded that it was Grant who signed the bill.

Grant’s reputation as a “butcher” was derived from his grim willingness to put the Civil War to an end by continuous combat with Lee (“I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” he wrote to Lincoln), yet he was so sickened by blood that he could not eat meat that wasn’t blackened to a crisp, and he was appalled when he saw his first bullfight in Mexico. He was a simple man without pretension or flair, and historians for too long mistook this for a deficit of intellect. Today, we could use more men like him.