What is the most important thing Ulysses S. Grant accomplished during the Lincoln Administration?

I am writing my senior thesis paper on Ulysses S. Grant and his actions during the Lincoln Administration and I am having trouble pinning a thesis for the paper. What scandal or accomplishment do you think would be best to focus my paper on? Let me know what you would write about. Thanks in advance.|||As Grant's contribution was leading the Union army to victory, I think you do a compare and contrast between General George B McCellan and Ulysses S Grant with particular emphasis on why Lincoln eventually choose Grant over McCellan. I say this because it has all the elements of a great story.|||He only won the Civil War, that's all!





During the first half of the war (April 1861-July 1863), the Union Army had one commander in chief after another; then at almost exactly the same time as the Confederate Army was being turned back from Gettysburg, an unpropossessing general in the Western Theater of the war was accepting the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Grant had been quiety winning victories in that part of the country for some time, and soon after he took Vicksburg, he came to the attention of Lincoln, who brought him east and put him in command of the entire Union Army. From then on he steadily pushed the Confederates back and finally accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox 145 years ago yesterday--April 9, 1865.





Is that an important enough accomplishment?|||*Sorry this is going to be long but hopefully useful to you:





I'd probably say that it wqas the fact that he was one of the few generals (maybe the only) who Lincoln could count on to get a victory pretty much every time during the American Civil War. During that time Lincoln had to be constantly be replacing Union generals who were in charge of fighting in the east because many of them proved incompetant or they would talk about how they were going to win, yet when the time came to fight, they would lose their battles badly to the Confederates. Grant on the other hand proved successful in his attempts at victory in the west. It was after a while of his continuation to do so that president Lincoln decided to have him start leading Union battles in the east (these battles were usually far more important than those in the west). Though Grant won a great deal, he did it for a great price not fearing to lose more men than his opponents in order to gain a victory. That strategy makes him a contoversial character though he was successful anyways.


So overall I would talk about his many victories that proved helpful for the Union as well as his methods for achieving them. You can talk about if you think it was right or wrong to know going into it that he would lose many lives of his troops but continued to go anyway, thinking that winning the war would justify it or was overall more important than the men he would lose.