Ulysses S. Grant posthumously promoted to general of the armies in defense bill; supporters also cite his later support of civil rights

Lt. Gen Grant outside his headquarters tent in Virginia (Library of Congress)

Ulysses S. Grant, remembered for securing victory for the Union in the Civil War, has been promoted posthumously to general of the armies, only the third person to attain the rank.

President Joe Biden on Friday signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes the appointment. Grant’s predecessors are George Washington (promoted in 1976) and John J. Pershing (1919).

The push for Grant to hold the rank was led by Sen. Sherrod Brown of his native Ohio and Sen. Roy Blunt and Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri. The bipartisan congressional resolution was linked to celebrations of the 200^th anniversary of the officer’s birth. General of the armies is the highest military honor in the U.S.

The resolution recognized that victories achieved under Grant’s command “were integral to the preservation of the United States of America and that he “is among the most influential military commanders in the history of the United States of America.”

The general gained famed in the Western Theater – including wins at Shiloh and Vicksburg -- before he moved east to oversee the final campaigns to quell the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him lieutenant general in March 1864.

Grant served two terms as president, from 1869 to 1877.

“Grant’s exemplary leadership on the battlefield could only be overshadowed by his commitment to a more just nation for all Americans during the Reconstruction Era,” Brown said earlier this year.

Although Grant’s presidency was wrapped in scandal, he is remembered for supporting civil rights, suppressing the Ku Klux Klan, establishing the Department of Justice and endorsing the 15^th Amendment, which granted African-American men the right to vote.

Anne Marshall, executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University, earlier this month wrote in support of the promotion.

“I believe that the promotion would be much more than a symbolic nod to a great military general,” Marshall said in an essay on The Conversation website. “Rather, it would highlight the overlooked legacy of a man who fought to end the last vestiges of slavery.”

This bayonet was found by an Illinois man tilling his garden. Did it belong to a soldier serving in Grant's first Civil War command?

The bayonet in its temporary exhibit (Nick Little, Market House Antiques)

Ulysses S. Grant camped here.

So reads a marker on the edge of the county fairground in Jacksonville, a city of 20,000 in west-central Illinois. The future American hero and the first men he commanded during the Civil War passed through the community only months into the conflict.

It would have been easier and quicker to put them on the train. But Col. Grant wanted the farm boys, merchants and bankers who joined the 21^st Illinois Infantry to be infused with more discipline and “good preparation” as they prepared for eventual battle.

Grant in 1861 (NPS)

On July 3, 1861, the Mexican-American War veteran led the regiment out of Camp Yates in Springfield toward Quincy about 100 miles away. Thirty miles into the march, they made a stop in Jacksonville, on July 5, where they rested at the Morgan County Fairground.

Some 140 years later -- in May 2002 -- a resident on West Lafayette Avenue, a few parcels from the fairground, was using a gas-powered tiller for a garden when it struck something metal. The item, about 8 inches beneath the surface, was a rusted but intact bayonet, slightly bent from the impact with the tiller. He also reportedly found unfired musket balls.

Bob Anderson last week donated the bayonet, believed to be from a Springfield (Mass.) musket, to the Jacksonville Area Museum, which will display it after the venue opens later this summer. 

“There is no way to confirm with absolute uncertainty” that the bayonet is related to the 21^st Illinois, David Blanchette, board chairman of the museum, told the Civil War Picket. But given its age, location and having been underground for such a long time, it could well be, he said.

Starting today and until it is relocated to the new museum, the bayonet will be display at Market House Antiques on State Street in downtown Jacksonville.

The donation came to light in a recent newspaper article and when the museum posted a Facebook item and photograph.

“It isn't hard to imagine a soldier who was being rushed off to war accidentally leaving it behind when the 21st Illinois left its overnight camp on the way to the Mississippi River,” Blanchette said in the post.

City to tell its story in a big way

The old post office will house exhibits (Jacksonville Area Museum)

The Jacksonville Area Museum, scheduled to open in late July, is preparing and building out its exhibits at its home in the city’s old post office. Jacksonville was founded in 1825.

The local convention and visitors bureau describes the town as “a community rich in historical treasures, with thriving arts, education, and culture, and wrapped in Midwest hospitality. Centrally located between St. Louis and Chicago, and near Springfield, Jacksonville offers an excellent place to live, work, and play.”

Blanchette says other Civil War items in the museum collection include letters, photos, diaries and a sword that belonged to Lt. William L. English, a Jacksonville native who served in the conflict and during the Indian Wars (left, in photo).

English died in 1877 from wounds received while fighting the Nez Perce at the Battle of the Big Hole in Montana. The museum has swords from other members of the English family.

The museum hopes the bayonet donation will encourage others to do the same, whatever the subject.

The venue is developing "engaging exhibits and original artifacts that tell the Jacksonville area's important, fascinating and often surprising history."

(A footnote: Heavyweight boxer Ken Norton was from Jacksonville and excelled in high school sports.)

These men needed a strong dose of discipline

Grant wrote in his memoirs about his brief time leading the 21st Illinois, from late June until Aug. 7, 1861, when he was commissioned a brigadier general and received a new assignment.

The men of the regiment, shortly after they enlisted for 30 days, refused to be led by their elected colonel, who apparently sometimes joined them in their carousing in their off time. Grant, then 39, was appointed to command the unruly unit, which was mostly made up of recruits from the eastern part of the state.

“I found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination; but the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask,” he wrote.

(Courtesy of Nick Little, Market House Antiques)

The regiment was ordered to proceed to Quincy on July 3. By that time, the men were performing company drill and were more like soldiers. When they reached Jacksonville, Grant was on horseback, leading the men along State Street. Few people knew who he was.

The fairgrounds were then called Camp Duncan and it was used for drilling raw recruits. The Morgan County Fair is still held most years on the 30-acre site purchased by local farm leaders in 1858. The Illinois State Fair, now held in Springfield, was held there a year before Grant’s men stopped by.

According to the Jacksonville Journal-Courier newspaper, A.Y. Hart, a member of the regiment from Mattoon, years later recalled their brief stay in July 1861. Several accounts say the regiment rested at the fairground and left before nightfall.

“Col. Grant stationed himself at the gate at the fairgrounds and examined our canteens for whiskey,” Hart said. “One man of my company bought a coffee boiler, stopped the passage between the boiler and spout with wax, filled the boiler with whiskey and the spout with milk, and Col. Grant passed him in.”

Grant is promoted and destiny takes over

The fairgrounds monument (Jacksonville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau photos)

Shortly after leaving Jacksonville, the regiment learned its destination was changed to Ironton, Mo., with Grant ordered “to halt where I was and await the arrival of a steamer which had been dispatched up the Illinois River to take the regiment to St. Louis.”

“The boat, when it did come, grounded on a sand-bar a few miles below where we were in camp. We remained there several days waiting to have the boat get off the bar, but before this occurred news came that an Illinois regiment was surrounded by rebels at a point on the Hannibal and St. Joe Railroad some miles west of Palmyra, in Missouri, and I was ordered to proceed with all dispatch to their relief. We took the (rail) cars and reached Quincy in a few hours.”

The regiment spent time in several towns in Missouri, across the river from Quincy, and then moved down to Ironton, where the promoted Grant was put in charge of the southeast part of the state.

The 21^st Illinois, with a new colonel, went on to fight in Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. Grant, as we know, would go on to be general-in-chief of the U.S. armies and the 18^th president, from 1869 to 1877.

The folks in Jacksonville recall their part of Civil War history.

“It was on Grant’s way to being an important part of U.S. history,” the museum’s Blanchette says.

American Civil War Museum in Richmond has a new CEO

After a yearlong search, the American Civil War Museum has found its new CEO and president: Rob Havers. Most recently, Havers served as president and CEO of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.

According to the museum, Havers has extensive museum, research library, archival and not-for-profit management experience with an academic background in military history and strategic studies. -- Article

In wartime and as president, Grant turned to his wife, Julia, for strength. She wore this opera cloak during celebrated world tour

Julia Grant's opera cloak (Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library)

A couple years back, mostly while commuting to work by train, I read a fascinating book, “Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War -- for Better and for Worse.” It focused on Julia Grant, Ellen Sherman, Jessie Fremont and Nelly McClellan.

Author Candice Shy Hooper described Jessie and Nelly as feeding their husbands’ delusions, egos and arrogance; she provided much more laudable descriptions of the other spouses:

Grants during the Civil War

“While Ellen Sherman’s and Julia Grant’s belief in their husbands’ character and potential was ardent, it was not unbounded,” reads a book summary on Amazon. “Ellen and Julia did not hesitate to take issue with their spouses when they believed their actions were wrong or their judgments ill-advised. They intelligently supported their husbands’ best instincts -- including trust in and admiration for Lincoln -- and rebuffed their worst. They were the source of strength that Sherman and Grant used to win the Civil War.”

The book made quite clear Julia Grant’s impact on Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War and his presidency, and it’s known that they were ardently devoted to each other. In May 1877, shortly after their two terms in the White House ended, the couple – weary of the stress of leadership -- embarked on a nearly three-year, heralded world tour. Their itinerary took them to Paris on three occasions and they spent a month there during one stop.

Among their social events was a trip to the opening of the opera house in the French capital. Julia in November 1877 purchased a black, beaded silk evening wrap for the occasion. She bought a second version as a wedding present for a family friend, Fannie Drexel.

The 37-inch-long restored cloak, created by renowned French designer Emile Pingat, is on display through December 2020 at Mississippi State University’s Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library museum in Starkville.

Restored neck band with designer label (Grant Presidential Library)

According to the university, the opera cloak, containing six panels of bead work, was restored earlier this year by New Orleans conservator Jessica Hack.

“Hack vacuumed the 140-year-old cloak with a low-suction, HEPA-filtered cleaner and hand dry-cleaned the piece with mineral spirits. She also clipped and trimmed loose and broken threads, restrung broken bead strands, stabilized the neckband with a crepe-line silk overlay, dyed china silk to blend with the color of the shredded band, and heat fused the crepe line and neckband together.”

Hack told the Picket the cloak “was in very good condition” and sturdy. But the interior neck lining had deterioration and threads used to string the beads were in poor condition.

“I put all those beads on, the sheer act of handling the coat, broke more threads,” she said. “If you replace strands of beads and the strand next to it is also rotted, it is going to break.”

Hack estimated she replaced 10%-15% of the threads in the garment. “When you are stringing bead by bead and more are falling off it is sort of a never-ending task.” She also put in a new lining.

Loose and broken threads were clipped and trimmed

Julia Dent Grant enjoyed being part of the social scene, according to histories, and enjoyed opera. Ulysses, well, not so much.

Mrs. Grant apparently went on a shopping spree in Paris, including a visit or two to the House of Worth.

“I had a splendid time shopping. Mr. Worth personally directed the fitting of my costumes, and Madam Virot attended me in person for any millinery I wished, and there were no small attentions, I assure you,” she said.

Julia Grant was cross-eyed and preferred profile images (Library of Congress)

Throughout the world tour, Ulysses was hailed as a hero more for his military accomplishments than his presidency.

The Grants settled in New York City after the tour ended in late 1879. They lost nearly all their money in an investment scheme and the president wrote his classic memoirs shortly before he died in 1885 in order to procure his family some security.

In the late 1890s, Julia gave the cloak to a young woman who was attending Corcoran Art School in Washington, D.C. and stayed at her home. The recipient’s grandson donated the garment to the Ulysses S. Grant Association in the 1970s.

Julia, born to a slave-owning family, traveled with her husband throughout his Civil War campaigns and was an indefatigable champion of his work and legacy. She died in 1902.

The Grants with son Jesse on vacation (Library of Congress)

“Although a typical woman of her era in some respects, she was extraordinary in many other ways,” the National Park Service says. “She had great strength of character, shared in the mixed fortunes of her husband Ulysses S. Grant, and promoted his welfare, loved and cared for her family, and fulfilled her patriotic duty as First Lady. “

Her own memoirs weren’t published until 1975.

Writing of her “Ulys,” Julia concluded: “For nearly thirty-seven years, I, his wife, rested and was warmed in the sunlight of his loyal love and great fame, and now, even though his beautiful life has gone out, it is as when some far-off planet disappears from the heavens; the light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me.”

New West Point statue of Ulysses S. Grant notes his humility and heroism as his presidential stature increases

Grant during the Civil War (Library of Congress)

Ulysses S. Grant had a quiet strength that impressed his classmates at West Point, even if his so-so academic record and long string of demerits might suggest that he would not have been held in high standing.

Shortly before the U.S. Military Academy cadet graduated in June 1843 -- as Ron Chernow writes in his biography “Grant” -- a classmate said Grant would be just the man of character to meet the challenge of a “great emergency.”

That emergency, of course, was the Civil War and its aftermath. Grant, who got to know many of his eventual battlefield foes while at West Point, led Federal armies to a victory that ended slavery. As the 18^th president, he worked to protect the rights of men and women freed by the war and against terror unleashed by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

West Point will commemorate Grant's courageous service Thursday afternoon with the unveiling of a statue of its famous graduate. It comes in celebration of the sesquicentennial of Grant’s presidential inauguration and the culmination of “Inspiration Week” at the academy in West Point, N.Y.

According to military.com, the monument will be unveiled by the statesman's great-great-grandson, Ulysses Grant Dietz, an art curator at the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Sculptor Paula Slater’s work features a full-figure 7-1/2 foot bronze statue upon a 4-1/2 foot granite base. (The general stood at 5-feet, 8 inches, a height he attained at West Point). A hatless Grant wears a four-star general uniform.

Slater said she wanted to capture Grant’s humility (Although he was known to eschew pomp and wore a private’s uniform with a simple rank designation).

“Imbued in this portrait of Grant is the torturous weight of life and death decisions he was required to make. It is this glimpse into his deeply enduring humanity that inspires and stays with the viewer,” her studio said.

The unveiling comes at a time of reputational rehabilitation for Grant, whose standing among presidents has risen in recent years. His legacy has long been dogged by accounts of his drinking and corruption and cronyism within his administration.

Chernow, in a 2017 interview with NPR after the release of his book, said Grant was stained by such descriptions.

“But to my mind, the big story of his presidency is he's really farsighted in courageous action in terms of protecting those four million former slaves who are now full-fledged American citizens, but who were under constant threat from the Klan in the South.”

Chernow and biographer Ronald C. White point out that Grant has moved up 11 places to No. 22 in C-SPAN surveys of presidential historians.

White, author of “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” writes in a Washington Post op-ed piece this week that the new statue is going up for the right reasons as other monuments of Confederate figures are being removed.

“A chief insight in the reappraisal of Grant is the recognition that, at the beginning of the post-Civil War period of oppression, he acted courageously to protect the rights of freed men and women,” White writes. “Grant’s fall from American grace largely coincided with the rise of white supremacy in the early 20th century. During that period, leaders who stood up for the rights of African-Americans were not often lionized.”

Observers might be surprised that only now a monument to Grant will rise above the West Point campus. A congressional committee in 2016 encouraged the secretary of the Army to install a memorial to the first academy grad to become commander in chief. He graduated 21^st out of 39 cadets, but he obviously left marked for greatness, even though he fell upon tough times between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War.

“Ulysses S. Grant embodied the West Point motto of duty, honor, country,” said Col. Ty Seidule, professor and head of the Department of History, in a West Point statement. “As a soldier, he led an army that emancipated four million people, ended slavery, and saved the United States of America. The Grant statue will inspire generations of cadets to become leaders of principle and integrity for the nation.”