The Strawfoot

It is hard to believe it is now 2 1/2 years ago, but at the start of the sesquicentennial there was a great piece in the USA Today about the descendants of various Civil War protagonists. If memory serves, they spoke to the relatives of Frederick Douglass, Jeb Stuart, and a few others asking them about their ancestors and what the Civil War means to them today. Last week Ulysses Grant Dietz and Bertram Hayes-Davis met at a professional gathering in Mississippi. Yes, as you may have figured, these are the great, great grandsons of U.S. Grant and Jeff Davis. Dietz is a curator at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, one of the great cultural institutions in the Northeast. Hayes-Davis is the executive director of Beauvoir, the Confederate president’s estate near Biloxi. Apparently the two men are talking loosely of collaborating to whatever degree in the future, which would make sense given their shared histories and professions.

(image/Jeffrey Reed)