Category Archives: Governors Island

Paying respects to Grant in Albany, August 1885

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Winfield Scott Hancock

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Stereoscopic view of General Grant’s Albany, NY funeral procession, August 4 or 5 1885

I spent a good portion of the day today telling visitors to Grant’s Tomb that this is the anniversary week of General Grants funeral. The famous procession attended by 1,000,000+ persons was held on August 8, 1885 in New York City. The Grant family held a private service at the Drexel house at Mt. McGregor on August 4, after which Winfield Scott Hancock and his staff from Governors Island brought Grant’s remains to Albany. There on August 4-5 some 80,000 people passed through the New York State Capitol to pay their respects. Not present was the Grant family, who had already gone on to New York City where they were staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on 23rd Street preparing for the event on the 8th. Widow Julia remained at Mt. McGregor, too distraught to take it all in. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted in its August 5 edition that “Albany did not go to bed last night.”

I wish the above stereoscopic image were clearer but this was the scene in Albany on either August 4 or 5 1885.

(image/NYPL)

Ulysses S. Grant Jr., 1852-1929

22 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant Jr. (Buck)

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Julia Dent Grant with Frederick and Ulysses Jr. in St. Louis, 1854. Lieutenant Grant was in the Pacific Northwest at the time and had not yet met his second son. This daguerreotype was discovered in 2016 and sold at auction in Cincinnati for $18,000.

Ulysses S. Grant Jr., Buck to the family, was born on this day in 1852. By this time his father was on his way to California with the 4th Infantry Regiment and a party of about seven hundred wives and children. The 4th was stationed briefly at Fort Columbus on Governors Island before their trip. Quartermaster Grant went briefly to the District of Columbia to see about supplies. While he was in Washington, Henry Clay—the Great Compromiser—died there, bringing things to a standstill. An empty-handed Grant returned to New York City and the regiment sailed for Panama on July 5.

This photograph of travelers crossing the Isthmus of Panama was taken in the early 1900s. The 4th Infantry crossed in much the same way over half a century earlier. One out of seven who made that trip died of cholera. This danger is why Ulysses and Julia decided the family would instead go to Bethel and then St. Louis.

Remember, the canal did not come into being until Theodore Roosevelt picked up where the French had failed. The Panama Canal opened in August 1914 at almost the same moment the Great War was starting. Instead travelers crossed the Isthmus by mule and wagon. To say that it was a hazardous journey would be an understatement. That is why Ulysses and Julia decided she and young Frederick, just two, would not make the voyage. Instead, they would go to Bethel, Ohio and then Missouri. It is a good thing they didn’t; one hundred people in the 4th Infantry’s party died of cholera. The pregnant Julia and the toddler Frederick might well have become two more victims. Instead Julia gave birth to young Ulysses in Bethel. Lieutenant Grant did not learn this until the mail finally reached the 4th Infantry at Fort Vancouver (Columbia Barracks) just before the new year.

(images/top, unknown photographer, taken in St. Louis (Cowan’s Auctions) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, Library of Congress)

Percy Grainger, 1882-1961

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Guest Posts, Jazz, New York City, Those we remember

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My good friend Molly Skardon, a fellow volunteer with the National Park Service here in New York City, wrote this guest piece about Percy Grainger, who was born this week in 1882. The musician and composer was already in his 30s when the war broke out in 1914. The next five years however would prove crucial in his personal and artistic development. Molly is uniquely suited to writing about Grainger. She has run the Oral History Project at Governors Island for many years and has interviewed many Army band musicians who were stationed on the island. She also works at Juilliard. New York City was the focal point for the American war effort, and even then becoming a nexus for the nascent jazz scene.

Happy Birthday to Australian musician Percy Grainger, born July 8, 1882. Grainger was pursuing an international career as a pianist and composer when the Great War began in Europe. Publicly criticized for not joining the British war effort, he sailed for America in 1915 and enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 1917, at age 34.

His first Army assignment was with the 15th Coast Artillery Band, stationed at Fort Hamilton, which is the ensemble pictured above. Grainger is the saxophonist in the center, above the small white X. Since it appears to have been chilly when the picture was taken, the time might be late 1917 or early 1918.

In June of 1918, Grainger came to Governors Island as an instructor in the program founded by the Institute of Musical Art (later part of what is now The Juilliard School) to train Army bandmasters and band musicians. Classroom instruction took place at the Institute, at Broadway and 122nd Street in Manhattan, and performing and conducting were taught on the Island.

Grainger was not particularly skilled on either the saxophone or the oboe, which he also played, but he was fascinated by wind, brass, and percussion instruments and wrote a great deal of music for them in various combinations, thus earning the gratitude of concert and military band players of succeeding generations. However, his most popularly known work is probably “Country Gardens,” an old English tune that he arranged for piano while at Fort Jay, as noted at the end of the published sheet music (“Written out, Fort Jay, Governor’s Island, N.Y., June 29, 1918”).

Grainger was discharged from the Army in 1919, and lived for the rest of his life in White Plains, New York just north of the city.

(image/Library of Congress Bain Collection)

Hancock and Armistead say goodbye in Los Angeles

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Gettysburg, Governors Island, Memory, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Detail from the Gettysburg Cyclorama depicting the mortal wounding of Lewis A. Armistead

About six years ago a friend and I hired a licensed battlefield guide to take us around Gettysburg. Even then I knew the outline of the battle pretty well, and had walked the terrain many times, but we wanted someone to do a deep dive specifically on Day 2. This of course means a strong emphasis on Winfield Scott Hancock. When the tour was over my friend and I had a discussion with our guide about various generals from the war. I mentioned that I volunteer at Governors Island and that Hancock commanded there after the war, and indeed died on the island in February 1886. I noted that it was from Governors Island that Hancock organized Ulysses S. Grant’s funeral in August 1885. The guide asked me about the relationship between Grant and Hancock. I explained that the two were deeply ambivalent to one another but that when Grant died Hancock said and did all the right things.

I say all this because today marks the anniversary of one of the most romanticized moments of the Civil War. It was on June 15, 1861 that Hancock and wife Almira hosted Lewis A. Armistead and others who were leaving immediately afterward for San Diego and then the long journey across the country to join the Confederate Army. Interestingly Almira Hancock later remembered George Pickett as having been there that evening, though he was not. Pickett was out west, in the Washington Territory, and eventually too made his way back East. He was not however at the party, as Almira recounted it in the reminiscences of her late husband that she edited and published in 1887. Some historians speculate that Mrs. Hancock remembered Pickett being there because he passed through Los Angeles shortly thereafter, just ahead of the military authorities seeking his arrest, and that the Hancocks may have secretly and illegally offered George Pickett refuge for a day to two before he went on his way. Looking back on it more than twenty years later, the argument goes, she conflated Pickett’s clandestine stay with the party that had taken place a few weeks previously. It seems plausible.

I am not much for romanticism when it comes to the American Civil War, and I am not succumbing to it here. The scene with Armistead, Hancock and the others has been sentimentalized in books, paintings, and treacly movie scenes countless times over the years. Nonetheless the emotions experienced that day were genuine. It is a very human moment.

(image/Ron Cogswell via Wikimedia Commons)

The Military Service Institution of the United States

24 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Writing

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I had a curious incident happen over the past week, one that ended with some good news. Late last week I was compiling my paperwork for my annual self evaluation and noted a “work in progress” that had been laying there dormant for some time. I emailed the editor to inquire if there was any news, and his response was “Oh, I never told you? We published that last year.” When I answered in the negative he told me to email the address and that he’d drop a few copies in the mail. The other day when I opened the box, there they were. The piece is about The Military Service Institution of the United States, a museum and professional organization founded by Winfield Scott Hancock on Governors Island in 1878. Leonard Wood ran the Military Service Institution when he himself commanded on the island just before and during the Great War.

The Journal of America’s Military Past was the ideal vehicle for an article about the Military Service Institution and it meant a lot to me to write the piece. Hancock, Wood, Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman, Dan Sickles, Frederick Dent Grant. These are just a few people who regularly attended events there. Twain of course had published Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs in 1886 and in these decades he was a regular on the Civil War reunion circuit. He was a renowned raconteur and ideal after dinner speaker. He once read early chapters of the yet-to-be-published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to a gathering of officers in the MSI library. The MSI was such an important part of American Army life for decades and has been virtually forgotten since it closed for good in the early 1920s after the First World War. Most the materials held within, including Phil Sheridan’s horse Winchester, went to the Smithsonian in Washington.

Colonel John C. Fremont Tillson’s March 1918

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

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John C. Fremont Tillson’s 1878 West Point cadet record.

As March 1918 was winding down the various armies were preparing for the spring fighting season. The Germans had begun Operation Michael on March 21, the first round in their Spring Offensive. The United States was still getting the American Expeditionary Forces up to speed. A significant aspect of that took place on Governors Island, where Colonel J.C.F. Tillson of the 22nd Regiment was in charge of rounding up shirkers from the Selective Service process. Some estimates in early 1918 put the number of shirkers from the draft as high as 250,000. Army officials crunched the numbers and were more sanguine, putting the number at around 50,000. This was still a sizable but not insurmountable number.

Colonel Tillson spent the winter and early spring of 1918 at Governors Island expediting the cases of Selective Service shirkers.

John C. Fremont Tillson graduated in the West Point Class of 1878 and spent the next forty years serving in all of the usual places one might expect an American military officer to serve in these decades: out West against the Indians, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, China, and now the Department of the East. Governors Island seemed to be a holding station for slackers across the Greater Northeast. Presumably the men were held in the jail within Castle Williams while awaiting their fate. Colonel Tillson worked diligently to make sure that shirkers were given every opportunity they could to avoid true punishment. He did this by starting from the premise that most men were not draft dodgers, per se, but individuals who had not reported for training due to some misunderstanding. Often literally.

Colonel Tillson noted to reporters and to audiences at public events that many of the men whose cases he saw did not speak English. It’s not surprising. Tillson’s adult life coincided with the massive influx of immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Seeing Ellis Island across the harbor from Fort Jay every day would have only emphasized that. Tillson often had to use translators to interview the men. Very few of these saw hard time. Most had their cases straightened out and headed off to Camp Upton on Long Island for training. Tillson remained in the Army through the end of the Great War and retired in 1920. For a decade he ran the New York State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Bath, New York. He died eight days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His wife died five days later. They are buried at Arlington Cemetery.

(bottom image/New York Times)

 

Rededicating the Merle Hay monument

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, Great War centennial, Monuments and Statuary, National Park Service

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Merle Hay monument rededication, Governors Island: 17 September 2017

One of the most poignant moments at Camp Doughboy this past weekend was the rededication of the Merle Hay monument on Sunday morning. The color guard you see here are active service personnel currently serving in the First Division’s 16th Infantry Regiment. They had come from Fort Riley in Kansas and are the same men who had been in Paris this past July for the ceremonies there. The men in uniform behind them are living historians who had set up camp on the island for the weekend. I snapped the image of the new tablet a few minutes after the unveiling. I thought I would re-up the video we produced a few summers ago about Private Merle B. Hay. It is so good to see that the Hay tablet is back where it belongs.

Private Merle Hay tablet, Governors Island National Monument

 

Antietam’s 155th

17 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Antietam, Governors Island

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Over the course of the day today at Governors Island, amidst the rededication of the Merle Hay monument, the author talks, and the rest of the programs, many of us noted that today is the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. It is hard to believe the sesquicentennial of that event was five years ago. While Americans were preparing for the Great War in summer 1917 they stopped to note the 55th Sharpsburg anniversary. Brooklyn held its own ceremony in Prospect Park on Saturday 15 September. As the headline notes above, there were still plenty of Grand Army Men around at this time. It is worth noting that what we now call Grand Army Plaza was still Prospect Park Plaza; the name change did not come until 1926. Some of the most prominent veterans at the 1917 turnout were Red Legged Devils from Brooklyn’s 14th Infantry Regiment. The juxtaposition of the two headlines, taken from the 16 September issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reveal how the country was looking backward and forward at the same time.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Sunday morning coffee

17 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, Great War centennial, Heritage tourism

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Camp Doughboy, Governors Island: September 16, 2017

It was a great day on Governors Island yesterday at Camp Doughboy. I’m having my coffee and listening to Bill Evans before I prepare to head out for today’s events. If you are in the New York City area, come on out for day two. There is much to see, including author talks, monument rededications, and the campground with living historians manning their quarters and speaking about their subject expertize. I visited a good many of them yesterday before and after my lightning talk and found all of the historians to be well-informed and eager to engage. Whether they have restored a period ambulance, built a doughboy’s kit through painstaking research and perseverance, or recount the story of a nurse, to a person they have created a thread that allows us to connect to the people who lived through the Great War. Seeing it al in one place make it that much more extraordinary.

It is the last weekend of summer 2017. Go get some of that sunshine.

(image/World War I Centennial Commission)

Sunday morning coffee

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, Great War centennial

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Good morning, all. I am sorry about the lack of posts this week. It has been a busy time at work with the new academic year underway. I wanted to remind everyone that Camp Doughboy is taking place next weekend, September 16-17, at Governors Island.  There is a lot to see and do. Author Kevin Fitzpatrick has been the great driving force behind the event and has done incredible work bringing it all together. You can check out the entire schedule here. Note that on Saturday at 1:30 a guy with my initials will be speaking about the Preparedness Movement. If you are in the Greater New York City area, try to come out for what should be an exciting two days with lots to see and do.