Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant) (1822- 1885) was general-in-chief of the Union Army from 1864 to 1865 during the American Civil War. Popular due to the Union victory, Grant was elected 18th President of the United States as a Republican in 1868 and was re-elected in 1872, the first President to serve for two full terms since Andrew Jackson forty years before. As President, Grant led Reconstruction and built a powerful patronage-based Republican Party in the South, straining relations between the North and former Confederates. His administration was marred by scandal, sometimes the product of nepotism, and the neologism Grantism was coined to describe political corruption. Grant left office in 1877 and embarked upon a two-year world tour. Unsuccessful in winning the nomination for a third term in 1880, left destitute by bad investments, and near the brink of death, Grant wrote his Memoirs, which were enormously successful among veterans, the public, and the critics.