Did Ulysses S. Grant do anything bold or unexpected during the American Civil War?

what leaps at me is that grant was a master of the second day of battle when men were exhausted and even starved and low on energy and dealing with adrenal exhaustion.

Other commanders would have withdrawn across the river after day one at Shiloh.  He pressed on and discovered a starving confederate army unable to put up resistance and he had fresh men.

And defeat became an important victory.  War s horrible but tge second day you are exhausted and miserable.  trench warfare ultimately taught us rotation and troop recovery  A line full of exhausted soldiers is no good to you.  three days without sleep and you will start seeing things..

Did Ulysses S. Grant do anything bold or unexpected during the American Civil War?

US Grant repeatedly did bold and unexpected things in the Civil War. Unlike most of the early US commanders in the east, for instance, when his troops took a licking one day, he stood them up and went at the enemy the next day instead of skulking off to lick their wounds. And more often than not beat them, too. “Grant had no quit in him.” And he never lost his cool.

Going back to the very beginning of his campaigning in the west, he acted on his own to occupy Paducah, KY ahead of approaching rebel forces, doing so without firing a shot and cutting off a rebel threat to navigation on the Ohio River. He raided the rebel base at Belmont, KY with a force less than 1/6 the size of the rebel force, overran the rebel base and then successfully extracted his troops when the rebels began to recover. He undertook a combined arms campaign with the cooperation of the navy agains rebel forts on the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, and by taking them, including the surrender of a rebel field army in Fort Donelson, with hardly any US casualties made the rebel batteries at Belmont and Columbus, KY unsupplyable and thereby forced their evacuation, opening the Upper Mississippi to US navigation and commerce, while opening 2/3 of Tennessee to US occupation and setting his army up to take the rebel rail hub at Corinth, MS. While this was delayed by the battle of Shiloh, where he came back from a first day loss to rout the rebels back to their base, the fall of Corinth by the end of May 1862 cut the south’s only completed east-west rail line and forced the rebels to evacuate all their bases on the Mississippi north of Vicksburg, including the major city of Memphis.

Without recounting every incident in Grant’s war, in the Overland Campaign, when Lee’s army, with the advantage of prepared defenses, inflicted punishing losses on Grant’s troops, Grant surprised Lee by continuing his campaign, marching to Lee’s flank, and forcing Lee to fall back toward Richmond. Lee simply had no idea how to stop Grant.

So yes, Grant repeatedly did bold and unorthodox things, and he won the war by them.