The man who saved the United States was named U.S. Grant by a clerical error.
He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Ohio on April 27, 1822. That was his name for the first seventeen years of his life.
In 1839, Congressman Thomas Hamer submitted Grant’s appointment to West Point. Hamer got the name wrong. He assumed the boy was Ulysses Simpson Grant — Simpson being his mother’s maiden name, not a middle name Grant had ever carried. The paperwork arrived at the Academy reading “U.S. Grant,” and that’s how they enrolled him.
Grant tried to fix it. West Point told him the official nomination stood and that changing it meant a bureaucratic fight nobody wanted.
Anyone who has served knows exactly how that conversation went. Once the military puts something in writing, it is awfully difficult to get it changed. Grant found this out at seventeen and lived with the result for the rest of his life.
He came around to it. He’d never liked “Hiram Ulysses” — the initials spelled H.U.G., which is not what you want stamped on your trunk in a barracks full of teenage boys. The mistake was an upgrade.
His classmates saw “U.S.” on the roster and started calling him “Sam,” short for Uncle Sam. Some just called him “United States.” His wife Julia called him “Ulys.”
And the S? It stood for nothing. Not Simpson. Not anything. A congressman’s guess, permanently attached to the general who won the Civil War and the president who served two terms.
There’s a certain justice in it. The most consequential soldier in American history got his name the same way most soldiers get anything — somebody in an office filled out a form wrong, and everyone downstream lived with it.
This is one of 101 questions answered in The Civil War Little Black Book: Secrets, History, and Trivia of America’s Defining Conflict.
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