Every U.S. President Who Was Also a General

There is a painting in the Capitol Rotunda, twelve feet by eighteen, that shows neither a battle nor a signing. John Trumbull’s ’General George Washington Resigning His Commission,’ painted between 1822 and 1824, catches the victorious commander of the Continental Army in the act of giving his power back to the civilians. That is the image the republic chose to hang at the center of its own government: not the general winning, but the general leaving.

The ambivalence never quite resolved. A country founded on the distrust of standing armies proceeded to elect soldiers almost as a habit, and the stars on this list weigh wildly different amounts. Some were won storming fortifications; one man’s arrived as a political appointment; another’s never left the state of New York. The list states each case plainly, because the asterisks turn out to be the best parts.

The rule of admission sits up front: brigadier general or higher, whether in the regulars, the volunteer service, or a state’s militia, at any point before or after the presidency. The parent roster – every man who has held the presidency – stands at forty-five so far, and roughly one in four of them qualifies. What follows is all of them, in presidential order, from the man in the painting to the supreme commander who came home from Europe.

George Washington

George Washington’s defining act as a soldier was handing the job back. Commissioned General and Commander in Chief of the Continental Army with rank from 15 June 1775, he carried the Revolution through to its end, then appeared before Congress in the Maryland State House at Annapolis on 23 December 1783 and resigned, bidding farewell to ’all the employments of public life.’ When George III heard what Washington intended, he reportedly remarked that the man who did such a thing ’would be the greatest man in the world.’

Public life had other plans, and so did the Army. In 1798, with France threatening war, President Adams recalled him as a lieutenant general. Washington accepted on his own terms, writing that July that he would not take the field ’until the Army is in a situation to require my presence’ – and he ran the appointment from Mount Vernon, where the fighting conveniently never reached him.

The Republic was not finished promoting him. Public Law 94-479, approved in October 1976, elevated Washington to General of the Armies of the United States, made effective, in a fine bicentennial flourish, retroactively on 4 July 1976. It was a promotion he was in no position to decline.

Andrew Jackson

The vote that made Andrew Jackson a major general ended in a dead tie, seventeen to seventeen. The February 1802 election for command of the Tennessee militia pitted Jackson, then 34 and without a combat command to his name, against John Sevier, a Revolutionary War veteran and the state’s dominant political figure; Governor Archibald Roane broke the tie in Jackson’s favor. Jackson assured Sevier afterward that he had barely pursued the office, writing that he was ’not even at Nashville on the day of election.’

The militia command turned out to matter enormously. Jackson broke the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend on 27 March 1814, and the regular Army, short of winning generals, reached for him: brigadier general that April, substantive major general on 1 May 1814. The following January came the Battle of New Orleans, where his improvised force of regulars, militia, free Black volunteers and Baratarian privateers inflicted more than 2,000 British casualties on 8 January 1815.

The famous asterisk on that victory is real, but smaller than advertised. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on 24 December 1814 – yet it was not ratified until February, and no word of peace had crossed the Atlantic. New Orleans was fought in a war that was ending, not a war that was over.

William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison fought his most famous battle as a civilian. At Tippecanoe on 7 November 1811 he commanded roughly 1,000 men not as a general but as governor of the Indiana Territory, which means the battle that named his presidential campaign predates his general’s rank entirely. The commissions came afterward: a regular Army brigadier general’s commission on 22 August 1812, then the major general’s grade on 2 March 1813.

He earned the second star’s keep at the Battle of the Thames on 5 October 1813, where his force outnumbered the British and their Native allies three to one and Tecumseh was killed. Then, with the war still on, Harrison resigned – 31 May 1814, aged 41 – and spent months in the East being feted at parties and banquets instead, a celebrity circuit his commission had presumably been getting in the way of.

The celebrity held for three decades. Inaugurated on 4 March 1841, Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in presidential history, without an overcoat in the raw chill, fell ill in late March, and on 4 April became the first of the presidents who died in office, 31 days into his term. Posterity blamed the speech. Modern researchers blame the capital’s unsanitary conditions, arguing the likelier killer was typhoid, not pneumonia. Either way, the general who outlasted Tecumseh’s confederacy could not outlast a Washington spring.

Zachary Taylor

Forty years in the Army, and Zachary Taylor had never once voted in a presidential election before his own. The Army promoted him almost entirely by exception in return. His first general’s star was a brevet, awarded on Christmas Day 1837 for the Battle of Okeechobee, and he never held an ordinary brigadier’s commission at all: he jumped from brevet honors straight to substantive major general on 29 June 1846, after his victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma that May.

Buena Vista, in February 1847, made him president. Congress credited ’Old Rough and Ready’ with defeating a Mexican army of ’more than four times their number’; the Library of Congress’s arithmetic puts it nearer three to one. Either way he won badly outnumbered, and an 1849 life of Taylor has his staff imploring him to retire from the enemy’s fire while he watched the action from a commanding height, one leg hooked over the pommel of his saddle.

The ledger at home was rougher. 81 enslaved people came with the Mississippi plantation he bought in 1842, and roughly 131 were left in his will, which places him among the presidents who owned slaves while in office. Elected in 1848, he died sixteen months into his term, on 9 July 1850, of a stomach illness argued over ever since – gastroenteritis by some accounts, cholera by others.

Franklin Pierce

In the fighting south of Mexico City in August 1847, Franklin Pierce’s horse stumbled and threw him against the pommel of his saddle, crushing his leg and knocking him unconscious. His soldiers, unimpressed, took to calling him ’Fainting Frank.’ The label was unjust – a crush injury is not a failure of nerve – but an illness that then kept him out of the assault on Chapultepec handed the story a second act, and by the 1852 presidential campaign his opponents had a full comic biography to work with.

The record underneath was more substantial than the nickname. Pierce, a former senator, was commissioned colonel of the new 9th Infantry in February 1847, then promoted on 3 March 1847 to brigadier general – a regular Army commission, not a volunteer one, the 9th being among the ten new regular regiments Congress had just authorized. Its men fought at Contreras, Churubusco and Chapultepec in Winfield Scott’s drive on the Mexican capital. Even which battle threw him is disputed: the Miller Center says Contreras, on 19 August; the American Battlefield Trust says Churubusco, fought the next day. The leg injury itself no one doubts.

Pierce resigned his commission in March 1848 and went home to New Hampshire with a bad leg and a worse nickname. The leg healed.

Andrew Johnson

When Tennessee seceded on 8 June 1861, Andrew Johnson stayed in his chair, the only Southern senator who kept his seat rather than follow his state out of the Union. Lincoln repaid the loyalty in 1862 by making him military governor of Tennessee, with the rank of brigadier general of United States Volunteers attached; the nomination went to the Senate on 3 March 1862 and was confirmed the same day. It was a political commission, and this list counts it candidly as one: the stars came with the governor’s office, not with a field command.

What he did instead was hold Nashville. Arriving in late March 1862, weeks after the city fell to Union forces, he governed a hostile capital while the war moved around it. The city’s centerpiece defense, Fort Negley, went up between August and December 1862, built by more than 2,700 conscripted laborers, most of them free and formerly enslaved Black Nashvillians – the largest inland fortification built during the Civil War. Its guns probably fired the opening shots of the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where John Bell Hood’s Confederate army was driven from the field.

Heitman’s register closes Johnson’s commission on 3 March 1865, the day before he was sworn in as vice president. On 15 April 1865, with Lincoln dead, the political general became an accidental president.

Ulysses S. Grant

In the years after he resigned his captaincy in 1854, Ulysses S. Grant sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis to keep his family fed. There is a statue of him now at 12th and Market, a corner where he frequently set up.

The war reversed everything. Grant was made colonel of the 21st Illinois in June 1861, brigadier general of volunteers later that year, major general of volunteers on 16 February 1862 immediately after Fort Donelson fell, and a regular Army major general on 4 July 1863, after Vicksburg. Then the existing grades ran out, and Congress took to reviving dead ones. Lincoln sent up his nomination as lieutenant general on 29 February 1864 – Leap Day – making Grant the first man to hold that rank substantively since George Washington, Winfield Scott’s having been only a brevet. In 1866 Congress went further still, reviving the grade of General of the Army of the United States by the Act of 25 July 1866; Grant became its first holder, the first full four-star general in the Army’s history.

He gave the commission up to be president on 4 March 1869. Then, on 3 March 1885, with Grant dying and about four months to live, President Chester A. Arthur – who appears further down this list – nominated him back onto the Army’s retired list as a four-star general. The Army wanted him on the books before the end.

Rutherford B. Hayes

’An officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped.’ That was Rutherford B. Hayes in 1864, declining to leave the field after Cincinnati Republicans nominated him for the House while he was commanding troops in the Shenandoah Valley. He won the election without campaigning in person.

He had earned the right to the opinion. Hayes went to war in 1861 as a major in the 23rd Ohio, and at Fox’s Gap on South Mountain, on 14 September 1862, a musket ball struck his left arm just above the elbow; he had a soldier tie a handkerchief above the wound and lay on the field roughly twenty minutes before his men carried him off. How many times he was wounded across the war is genuinely unsettled – the National Museum of Civil War Medicine counts three, his own presidential library four, the Miller Center five – a spread that says less about the record-keeping than about how often he put himself in the way of fire. His brigadier generalship of volunteers carries the date of rank 19 October 1864, the day of the Battle of Cedar Creek, with a brevet major generalship of volunteers to rank from 13 March 1865.

Hayes finally took his House seat in December 1865, once the war was over and there was no post left to abandon.

James A. Garfield

The Union victory that cleared eastern Kentucky was engineered by a sitting college president. James A. Garfield had run the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute – later Hiram College – before the war, and on 10 January 1862 he beat a Confederate force at Middle Creek by arranging his outnumbered troops so the other side believed the arithmetic ran the other way. Two dates later tell the story of his rise: he was appointed brigadier general of volunteers on 11 January 1862, at age thirty, and major general of volunteers with date of rank 19 September 1863.

That second date was the opening day of the main fighting at Chickamauga, where Garfield, then chief of staff of the Army of the Cumberland, made the ride that made his name – riding under enemy fire toward George Thomas’s position to learn whether part of the shattered Union line still held. It did. The ride became legend, and the promotion followed.

Garfield resigned his commission on 5 December 1863 to take the House seat Ohio had elected him to, and politics carried him the rest of the way. It also killed him. Shot on 2 July 1881, four months into his presidency, he lingered eighty days and died on 19 September 1881 – eighteen years, to the day, after the date of rank on his major general’s commission.

Chester A. Arthur

Chester A. Arthur joined the New York State Militia in 1858, by the Miller Center’s account, ’principally out of a desire for companionship and political connections.’ The war then made the connections real: he rose through the state’s staff offices to quartermaster general, a post carrying a brigadier general’s rank in state service, and in that job he clothed, equipped, and armed many of the 300 regiments New York raised for the Civil War, while supervising the defenses of New York.

This page’s rule admits him with the asterisk showing. Arthur’s commission was a state staff appointment – he never held field command – and his military career ended in 1863 not with a battle but with his retirement from duty and a return to his Manhattan law practice. Logistics, though, is not nothing: regiment after regiment went to war dressed, armed, and fed because a Manhattan lawyer turned out to be exceptionally good at paperwork.

History gave him a stranger promotion. When Garfield died on 19 September 1881, Arthur became one of the vice presidents who inherited the presidency, taking the oath the next day in his own house at 123 Lexington Avenue from a New York judge. Since 1967, by a tradition Lyndon Johnson began, a wreath has been laid each October at his grave in Albany Rural Cemetery. The Army counts him, even when pedants do not.

Benjamin Harrison

At Resaca in May 1864, Benjamin Harrison personally led the 70th Indiana over a fortified Confederate battery and into hand-to-hand fighting with its gun crews, coming away with four Napoleon cannon. The war had found him differently. Asked by Indiana’s governor to raise a regiment in 1862, the Indianapolis lawyer answered, ’Governor, if I can be of any service, I will go.’ He had 1,000 men recruited by 8 August 1862, and Heitman’s register dates his colonelcy of the new 70th Indiana to that same week.

Through the Atlanta campaign he commanded a brigade – Resaca, then Peachtree Creek on 20 July 1864 – and the generalship followed: brevet brigadier general of volunteers, dated 23 January 1865. A brevet, it should be said plainly, not a substantive commission – but earned at the sharp end.

He was the grandson of William Henry Harrison – a grandfather-and-grandson pair of general-presidents. At five feet six inches, he also fought a lifelong campaign against the nickname ’Little Ben,’ coined by Democratic opponents. Republicans answered that he was big enough to fill his grandfather’s legacy. His Indianapolis home now operates as the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, which completed a six-million-dollar renovation in 2022 and draws thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand visitors a year.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sixteen years, nearly to the day, separated Dwight D. Eisenhower’s promotion to major on 2 July 1920 from his next step up, to lieutenant colonel, on 1 July 1936. The stall was not for lack of trying. In 1918 he had commanded Camp Colt at Gettysburg, the Tank Corps camp where over ten thousand Americans trained for tank warfare, earning him the Distinguished Service Medal; the war ended on 11 November 1918 before he or his tanks could deploy, and he never saw combat in his life.

The man the interwar Army could not find a use for ended up commanding all of it, and everyone else’s too. Appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943 – Roosevelt announced it to the nation in his Christmas Eve fireside chat – Eisenhower directed armies drawn from the countries that fought in World War II through the liberation of Western Europe, and on 20 December 1944 he received the five stars of General of the Army.

He resigned his commission in July 1952 to run for president, and in March 1961 Public Law 87-3, signed by President Kennedy, restored him to the Army’s active list with his date of rank preserved as December 1944. On the Army’s books, in other words, the presidency was a leave of absence.