Ulysses S. Grant

Earth takes five of his ten planets, fire three, water two, and not one of the ten sits in air. Five of the ten are cardinal with a single mutable. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn fill eleven degrees of Taurus, and Saturn and Pluto both sit on the first degree of a sign. The record says Grant won the Civil War and then used federal troops against the Klan, and that bankrupted by a swindle and dying of throat cancer he wrote his memoirs in a year to provide for his family.

Saturn sits in quiet contact with Pluto at under half a degree, and the reading is durable strength: rebuilding after loss, and authority that has genuinely been earned. Rebuilding after loss is about as close to that record's third sentence as a generic reading is ever going to get. A man bankrupted by a swindle, with a terminal diagnosis, writing a book inside a year so his family would have an income, is rebuilding after loss in the most practical sense the phrase has.

It is also a slow pair, shared with everybody born across those years, which is the standing problem with the best fits in this project. No air at all is the fact that belongs to him alone, and in a man whose last act was writing it reads as an inverse: air is the element of what gets said and compared, and the chart has none of it, in somebody who produced a book still read a century and a half later. Five planets in earth and five cardinal is the rest of the balance, which is a chart that starts things and then makes them solid.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Uranus at under half a degree, independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual, and sudden opportunities that suit them. Venus stands at an awkward angle to Mars at just over a degree, attraction and drive disagreeing. His Moon sits on the last degree of Cancer at noon with Leo still possible, so it is left out, and that costs the tightest transit on the day he died. Uranus and Neptune were the two retrograde planets. He died at Wilton on 23 July 1885, at sixty three. The transiting Sun stood square his natal Saturn at just over a fifth of a degree that day, Mars sixty degrees from its own natal place at under a third, and Jupiter in easy contact with his natal Sun at a third. The Moon was gibbous and ninety per cent lit.