Every U.S. President Who Was Also a General

Twelve men who sat in the Oval Office first gave orders on a battlefield. Some commanded armies that changed the course of history. Others held the rank in name only, their “generalship” a political appointment rather than a combat commission. All of them brought military experience – and military instincts – into the presidency.

Here is every U.S. president who held the rank of general officer before taking office.

George Washington

George Washington’s military career began not in triumph but in failure. At age 22, he commanded a small Virginia militia force at Fort Necessity in 1754, was surrounded by French and Native American troops, and surrendered – signing a document he could not read because it was written in French. He learned. Over the next three decades, he became the most consequential military commander in American history, leading the Continental Army through eight years of war against the most powerful military force on earth.

What made Washington’s legacy unique wasn’t just victory – it was what he did afterward. In 1783, with the war won and his troops still armed, Washington voluntarily resigned his commission and returned power to the civilian Congress. European observers were stunned. King George III reportedly said that if Washington truly gave up power willingly, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” In 1976, Congress settled the question of his rank permanently by promoting Washington posthumously to “General of the Armies of the United States” – a title specifically created to ensure he could never be outranked by any future officer, including five-star generals. He holds the highest military rank in American history and always will.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was a violent, brilliant, and deeply controversial man who carried two bullets in his body from duels and brawls – and who won the most famous battle of the War of 1812 after the war was already over.

Jackson had been elected Major General of the Tennessee Militia in 1802 and earned his federal military reputation through campaigns against Creek warriors in the South. His moment of national fame came on January 8, 1815, at the Battle of New Orleans. His forces – a ragtag mix of regular soldiers, militia, pirates, and free Black volunteers – devastated a professional British army that outnumbered him, inflicting over 2,000 British casualties while suffering fewer than 100. The victory made him a national hero overnight.

The catch: the Treaty of Ghent, formally ending the War of 1812, had been signed two weeks earlier, on December 24, 1814. The news hadn’t reached Louisiana. Jackson fought and won a battle in a war that had already legally ended. It didn’t matter – the victory launched him toward the presidency anyway.

William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison came from one of Virginia’s most prominent families and spent his youth hearing stories about General Washington from people who had served alongside him. He left medical school at 18 to pursue a military career, enlisting as an ensign and catching the attention of General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, who made him a personal aide. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, Wayne cited Harrison personally for bravery under fire.

Harrison’s most famous military action came in 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe in present-day Indiana, where he defeated a confederation of Native American tribes led by Tecumseh’s brother. The victory gave Harrison his famous campaign slogan – “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” – and defined his public image as a frontier warrior.

That image did him no favors in his only month as president. Determined to prove he was no doddering old soldier, Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in U.S. history – nearly two hours – standing hatless in cold, wet weather. He developed pneumonia and died exactly 31 days into his presidency. It remains the shortest presidency in American history.

Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor spent 40 consecutive years in the U.S. Army – from his first commission in 1808 until his election as president in 1848 – without ever expressing interest in politics. His men called him “Old Rough and Ready” because he refused to wear a proper uniform in the field, dressing like a common soldier and sleeping on the ground alongside his troops. He was comfortable with hardship in a way that made his men trust him completely.

The battle that defined his career came at Buena Vista in February 1847. Mexican General Santa Anna intercepted communications revealing that Taylor had been left with just 6,000 troops – mostly untested volunteers – and threw nearly 20,000 soldiers at him. Taylor held the field. When the smoke cleared, Mexico had suffered over 1,800 casualties. Taylor’s army had lost 672. The victory made him famous across the country and won him the Whig presidential nomination the following year.

He never sought it. He had never voted in any election before running in one.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce went to Mexico a private and came back a general – not because of battlefield valor, but because of who he knew. President James K. Polk owed Pierce a political favor for managing his New Hampshire campaign, and when Pierce requested a commission, Polk delivered. By the time Pierce’s forces sailed for Mexico, he was already a Brigadier General.

His combat record in the Mexican-American War was complicated. At the Battle of Contreras in 1847, his horse was shot and fell on him, crushing his knee and briefly knocking him unconscious. When he came to, his troops had already concluded he had fainted from cowardice. The nickname “Fainting Frank” followed him into his 1852 presidential campaign. Pierce found the charge infuriating – he had continued fighting despite serious injury – but the damage was done.

Pierce served one term as president and is consistently ranked among the worst in American history, widely blamed for accelerating the divisions that led to the Civil War through his support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson is the only Confederate-state senator who refused to leave the Union after secession. When Tennessee voted to secede in 1861, Johnson stood on the Senate floor and declared his loyalty to the United States, becoming an immediate symbol of Southern Unionism and an immediate target for his neighbors.

President Lincoln appointed Johnson Military Governor of Tennessee in 1862 with the rank of Brigadier General. It was a political title, not a combat command – Johnson’s job was to govern a Union-occupied state, maintain order, and administer civilian affairs. He never led troops in battle. His authority was the authority of an occupying administration, backed by the Army but not commanded by him in any military sense.

That distinction mattered less than the symbolism. Lincoln chose Johnson as his 1864 running mate specifically because of his loyalty and his Southern roots – a unity ticket for a nation at war with itself. Johnson became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, and his presidency descended almost immediately into conflict with Congress over Reconstruction, ending with his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1868. He was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate.

Ulysses S. Grant

In 1860, Ulysses S. Grant was 38 years old and working as a clerk in his younger brother’s leather shop in Galena, Illinois. He had resigned from the Army in 1854 under pressure – his commanding officer had given him a choice between resigning and facing court-martial for drinking on duty. He had then failed at farming, failed at bill collecting, and failed at nearly every civilian occupation he attempted. He pawned his watch one bleak Christmas to buy presents for his family.

When the Civil War started, the governor of Illinois discovered that Grant was one of the only trained officers in the state who wasn’t already commissioned. He was given command of a volunteer regiment that no one else had been able to discipline. Grant imposed order immediately. Within two years, he was commanding general of the Union Army – the largest military force in American history to that point.

Grant accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. He was later promoted to General of the Armies, the highest rank in the U.S. military, matching Washington’s posthumous title. He remains one of the most remarkable military careers in history – from pawnbroker to Appomattox in less than four years.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford Hayes was a Harvard-educated criminal defense lawyer in Cincinnati when the Civil War began. He had no military training. He enlisted immediately as a major in the 23rd Ohio Infantry, and proved almost immediately that he was exactly the kind of officer armies need: calm, decisive, and impossible to rattle.

Hayes was wounded in battle four times. At the Battle of South Mountain in September 1862, a musket ball shattered his left arm as he was leading a charge up the slope. He fell, his arm broken, and lay exposed on the hillside while the battle raged around him. He refused to be carried off. He lay where he fell and gave orders until the position was taken.

In 1864, while Hayes was still in the field, the Ohio Republican Party nominated him for Congress. He was informed and declined to campaign. “An officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress,” he wrote, “ought to be scalped.” Ohio elected him anyway. He eventually served as president from 1877 to 1881, winning one of the most disputed elections in American history.

James A. Garfield

James Garfield grew up in poverty in rural Ohio, the son of a widowed mother who worked the family farm alone. He ran away at 16 to work on canal boats, fell overboard fourteen times in six weeks, contracted a fever, and went home. He concluded that he should make his way in the world using his mind rather than his fists. He worked as a school janitor to put himself through college, became a professor and then president of the Eclectic Institute – a small Ohio religious college – and passed the Ohio bar exam entirely through self-study.

He also had no military training whatsoever when the Civil War started. He organized the 42nd Ohio Infantry in August 1861 from scratch, reading military manuals to teach himself tactics. His brigade defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Middle Creek in January 1862, a victory that secured Union control of eastern Kentucky. He was promoted to Major General at 31 – one of the youngest in the entire Union Army.

Garfield was elected president in 1880, the last president born in a log cabin. He was shot by an assassin in a Washington train station on July 2, 1881, four months into his first term, and died 79 days later – his death caused as much by the medical treatment he received as the wound itself.

Chester A. Arthur

Chester Arthur joined the New York state militia in 1858 not out of patriotic duty but because the connections were useful for an ambitious young lawyer. When the Civil War broke out, the Republican governor of New York appointed him Quartermaster General of the state’s volunteer forces – a critical logistics role responsible for housing, feeding, equipping, and transporting hundreds of thousands of New York soldiers to the front.

Arthur was good at it. The administrative challenge was enormous and he handled it efficiently, later being promoted to Inspector General and ultimately to Brigadier General. He never heard a shot fired in combat. His war was fought in warehouses, supply depots, and government offices, ensuring that the men who did the fighting had boots on their feet and food in their packs.

He was removed from the position in 1863 when a new Democratic governor replaced Republican political appointees across the state. His military career ended not with a battle but with a change in administration. Arthur went on to become president through succession – he was vice president when Garfield was assassinated in 1881.

Benjamin Harrison

Benjamin Harrison is the only president in American history whose grandfather was also a president – and also a general. William Henry Harrison, the third entry on this list, was the elder; Benjamin was the younger, born in 1833, 40 years after his grandfather’s birth.

Benjamin Harrison commanded a brigade in General Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign of 1864, including the Battle of Resaca and the grinding advance through northern Georgia. His troops called him “Little Ben” – he stood 5 feet 6 inches tall – but they respected his nerve under fire. He led his brigade in multiple engagements as Sherman cut through the South, and was promoted to Brevet Brigadier General for his service.

Harrison served as president from 1889 to 1893. His single term would be followed by a remarkable 60-year drought – from 1893 to Eisenhower’s election in 1952, no general would reach the White House.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915 ranked 61st out of 164. His superiors considered him a capable but unremarkable officer. Early in his career, he published an article arguing that the Army should make better use of tanks – his commanding officers threatened him with a court-martial for challenging official doctrine. For most of the following two decades, he served in staff positions, working as an aide to General MacArthur in the Philippines through the 1930s. He had never commanded troops in combat when World War II began.

Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, one of the most demanding judges of military talent in American history, watched Eisenhower’s performance in training exercises and chose him to command Allied forces in North Africa in 1942. The promotions came fast after that: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and then Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. On the morning of June 6, 1944, Eisenhower gave the order to launch the largest amphibious invasion in history despite uncertain weather – “Okay, let’s go.” The D-Day landings succeeded.

He went from obscure lieutenant colonel to five-star general in three years. In 1952, he was elected president by a landslide – ending the longest gap between general-presidents in American history. He remains the last general to hold the office.

Of the forty-six men who have served as president of the United States, twelve held the rank of general officer before taking office. The last was Eisenhower, elected in 1952. No general has been elected president since.