Today marks the 200th birthday of our county’s namesake and one of America’s greatest sons: Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant was born April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. “Unlike many great historical figures,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow in his 2017 biography “Grant,” as a boy and adolescent “Grant brooded on no vast dreams, harbored no spacious vision for his future, and would have settled for a contented, small-town life.” Fate, however, had much more in store for young Ulysses.

In 1838, Ulysses’ father, Jesse, arranged for his son to be appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Excelling in horsemanship but otherwise an average student, Grant graduated in 1843 in the middle of his class. He served in the Mexican War, married, and served peacetime assignments in New York, Oregon and California. In 1854 he resigned his commission and returned to the Midwest, farming 60 acres of his father-in-law’s land. Failing as a farmer, Grant sought to sell firewood in St. Louis — but success eluded him there, as well. In 1860, other options exhausted, Grant grudgingly took a clerical job at his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois.

With the advent of the Civil War, Grant’s fortunes changed. After helping organize Galena’s company of Union volunteers, he rose swiftly — from administrative aide to regimental colonel to brigadier general. Early in 1862, Grant and his troops took the Confederate Forts Henry and Donelson; at the latter, they captured 13,000 enemy troops. Later, Grant-led armies were victorious in the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), the Vicksburg campaign (late 1862 to July 1863) and the Battle of Chattanooga (fall of 1863).

After these successes in the war’s western theater, in March 1864 President Lincoln appointed Grant commander of the Armies of the United States. In this position, writes Chernow, “he presided over twenty-one army corps … with a total of 533,000 battle-ready troops.” Fighting, now, in the eastern theater, Grant utilized the North’s superior manpower and firepower to wear down Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. In April 1865 at Appomattox, Virginia, Grant accepted Lee’s and the South’s surrender.

A national hero, Grant was elected president in 1868 and served two terms. He pursued civil service reform, returned the United States to the gold standard, and fought valiantly but with limited success to reincorporate a still-bitter South into the Union. After leaving office, Grant took a lengthy world tour and contended in 1880 for yet another term as president. Near the end of his life, beset with tongue and throat cancer, Grant wrote his autobiography, which he completed mere days before his death in July 1885.

As are other great men of America’s past, Grant today is under assault by “woke” radicals. They invoke as proof of his “racism” his brief ownership, as a young man, of one slave — whom he’d acquired (possibly as a gift) from his father-in-law. And they cite, during his presidency, the U.S. Army’s clashes with Indians and his support of placing Indians on reservations.

Grant, however, freed the one slave shortly after taking possession of him. This was consistent with his overall view on slavery: In a postwar discussion with German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Grant told him the war was fought because “slavery must be destroyed … it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.” As president, Grant fought the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South — and, writes Chernow, appointed “an unprecedented number of blacks … as ambassadors, customs collectors, internal revenue agents, postmasters, and clerks.” Indeed, posits Chernow, Grant “deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln, for what he did for the freed slaves.”

In his first inaugural address, Grant promised a new U.S. policy to pursue, as he described it, “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land — the Indians.” He did support sequestering many Indians on reservations. But he supported this in large part, writes historian William S. McFeely, “so they would be protected from white incursions” — and indeed, as president, he ordered the War Department to forcibly remove white settlers who encroached on treaty-protected Indian lands. He appointed Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian, commissioner of indian affairs. And he received Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud in the White House, as per biographer Ronald C. White, “with the pomp and pageantry reserved for a head of state.”

Rather than vilify Grant, today’s “woke” Americans should heed the words of someone who actually knew him: Frederick Douglass, perhaps the foremost Black American of the 19th century. Of Grant, Douglass wrote: “To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. … The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house.”

Our county should be proud to share the name of Ulysses S. Grant.