Ulysses S. Grant Was a Failure. Until He Wasn’t. That’s the Point.

PERFECTLY ME LIVING  ·  REFLECTIONS  |  PRESIDENTS & CHARACTER — PART 1 OF 3

What a broken-down soldier’s quiet act of principle taught me about what we’re really building at Perfectly Me Hero Camps.

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I’ll be honest with you: I am a politics person. I worked on Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. I managed U.S. Senate campaigns in a swing state. I have spent a meaningful portion of my adult life watching public service up close — and what I can tell you, with certainty, is this: that is where you see character. Not in the speeches. In the moments between them.

So when I’ve been spending my evenings watching documentaries about our presidents, it’s not casual viewing for me. I’m looking for something. And lately, the figure I keep returning to is Ulysses S. Grant.

Here’s a man who graduated from West Point — a man of real ability — and then fell so hard that by his late thirties he was in abject poverty. Pushed out of the army, his reputation shadowed by drinking, working the land alongside enslaved people on his wife Julia’s family farm. No one expected much of him anymore. History had quietly closed the book on Ulysses Grant.

Grant was offered $1,000 for a man’s freedom. He needed that money. He freed William Jones anyway.

Think about what that means. He wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t powerful. He was nobody at that point — a West Pointer who’d become a farmhand. But he looked at William Jones, a man he’d worked beside, and he made a principled choice when a profitable one was right there in front of him.

That is character. And character — as I tell every camper at Perfectly Me’s Hero Camps — does not happen by accident.

What strikes me about Grant isn’t the redemption arc — though it is extraordinary, the general who led the Union Army, the president who enforced Reconstruction with more moral conviction than almost anyone who followed. It’s the quiet, invisible moments before all of that. The moments when no one was watching. When there was no glory to be won. When a man with very little chose to give more away because it was right.

Those are the moments that build a person.

That’s exactly why Hero Camps exist. Every summer, we bring children ages 5 to 11 together and we do something that might sound simple but is actually countercultural: we name the values we want them to carry. Out loud. On purpose. Kindness. Respect. Empathy. Resilience. Responsibility. Teamwork. Community-mindedness. We don’t assume kids absorb these things from the air. We build them — through curriculum, through experience, through the example of the counselors around them — one session, one conversation, one small act of courage at a time.

Grant didn’t wake up on that farm and decide to be a man of principle in that moment. That decision came from somewhere. From something that had been built in him, long before the war, long before the White House. Character is cumulative. It is made of a thousand small, unwitnessed choices.

History remembers Grant as a general and a president. I remember him as a man who, when no one was watching, chose to do the right thing anyway. The right thing not for himself, but for someone else. That’s the hero I want our campers to become.

We need to remember this. Especially for our kids. Because the heroes of tomorrow are sitting in our camps and our classrooms and our living rooms today — and someone has to decide that these values are worth teaching deliberately. Worth protecting. Worth passing on.

Ulysses S. Grant proved that a person can be counted out and still become something remarkable. But more than that, he proved that the foundation for all of it — for the generalship, the presidency, the legacy — was already being laid in the quiet, unglamorous moments nobody thought to write down.

That’s the work. That’s always been the work.

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Written by Raquel Whiting Gilmer  ·  Founder & CEO, Perfectly Me Living LLC

Next in this series: Abraham Lincoln  ·  Coming soon