Category Archives: Governors Island

Henry Clay, 1777-1852

29 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Governors Island, Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Henry Clay was one of the great American statesmen of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Here is a small story that, while I wouldn’t read too much into it, nonetheless offers a reminder of the importance of place. I was manning the information desk at Federal Hall this morning when a man came in with his two teenage sons. I asked if they were in town doing the tourist thing and the dad responded yes. The family was from Kentucky and the father was clearly an intelligent, aware fellow. It turns out he was a high school history teacher. I told him I’ve always wanted to visit Kentucky and tour Ashland, the historic home of Henry Clay. He responded that he had been there several times and that it is indeed beautiful. This led to a brief discussion about Henry Clay’s life and legacy, including his role in the struggle to save the Second Bank of the United States against the equal determination of President Andrew Jackson to quash it. Old Hickory won that struggle, and in the 1840s Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk created the Independent Sub-Treasury to carry on some of the functions of the now-gone national bank. What is now Federal Hall was the New York Sub-Treasury from 1863-1920.

An hour later I go into the room where the ranger’s desk is and ask the ranger on duty what he’s working on. He said he was writing a social media post about Henry Clay, who it turns out died on this day, June 29, in 1852. I naturally told him about the man and his family from earlier. This led to an interesting discussion on the importance of learning about and understanding the lives and legacies of the leaders who, for good and ill, gave us the nation we live in. Clay certainly fits that category.

Clay died in the National Hotel on June 29, 1852, where he lived for decades when not in Kentucky. Seen here in the early twentieth century, the National closed in 1931 and was torn down in 1942.

Later in the afternoon a couple come in and ask me and the ranger about the other NPS sites in Manhattan. It turns out the couple were from Ft. Lauderdale and are currently on an extended sailing trip across the Eastern Seaboard. They had been at sea for several weeks and had docked their boat in New Jersey for the weekend while touring New York City. They wanted to know especially about Governors Island, and so I gave them the Cliff Notes version of the island’s history. Captain Ulysses S. Grant was stationed there briefly in 1852 before his regiment was slated to sail for California via the Isthmus of Panama. In June Grant went briefly to Washington D.C. on War Department business. It was Sam Grant’s first time in the District of Columbia and his trip there happened to coincide with the passing of . . . Henry Clay, who died of tuberculosis at the National Hotel when the young captain was in town.

Go where history was made. You never know what you’ll see or hear.

(image/Library of Congress)

Robert Moses vs President and First Lady Roosevelt

05 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Governors Island, Herbert H. Lehman, Robert Moses

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A model of Robert Moses’s unrealized Brooklyn-Battery Bridge

One of the biggest myths about Robert Moses is that he was so powerful that he managed to build whatever he wanted wherever he desired. In reality nothing could have been further from the truth; Moses worked within political and economic realities and more often than not had to change his plans to satisfy elected officials, citizens, insurance companies, and other stakeholders. One project dear to his heart was the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. If you have never heard of it, that’s because it never got built. The bridge would have gone fro the Manhattan Battery to Brooklyn Heights.

It almost happened. Moses pushed the initiative through the myriad city agencies and managed to get Governor Herbert H. Lehman signed off on the measure. It took none other than President Franklin Roosevelt to quash the deal. It was a personal thing with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; they were New Yorkers who owned a house on East 65th Street, Franklin was briefly a Wall Street lawyer, and their Roosevelt ancestors had roots in the city dating back to the mid-seventeenth century.

Eighty years ago today, writing from far off Seattle in her April 5, 1939 “My Day” column, Eleanor wrote obliquely of Moses and his proposed bridge:

“I have a plea from a man who is deeply interested in Manhattan Island, particularly in the beauty of the approach from the ocean at Battery Park. He tells me that a New York official who is, without doubt, always efficient, is proposing a bridge 100 feet high at the river, which will go across to the Whitehall Building over Battery Park. This, he says, will mean a screen of elevated roadways, pillars, etc., at that particular point. I haven’t a question that this will be done in the name of progress, and something undoubtedly needs to be done. But isn’t there room for some considereation of the preservation of the few beautiful spots that still remain to us on an overcrowded island? After all, lower Manhattan at Battery Park is one of the gateways through which many of us leave and enter our country. These moments are important moments in our lives and the irritation of an eyesore perpetrated in the name of progress will be bad for the souls of many Americans.”

If you look at the rendering above, you see that the proposed bridge would have cut through the harbor directly north of Governors Island, still a major headquarters of the U.S. Army. Further north, in the East River, was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Besides ruining the beautiful views Mrs. Roosevelt speaks of, there were national security implications. And that was how the president and his Secretary of War, Harry H. Woodring, killed the thing, declaring the harbor too important for national security interests to have such a bridge cross through it. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was built instead.

(image/New York Preservation Archive Project)

 

Mayors Mitchel and McClellan

17 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, John Purroy Mitchel

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George B. McClellan Jr. tablet, Battery Maritime Building. The son of the Civil War general was one of the most important mayors in the history of New York City and later served in the Great War.

What a great weekend it was for Camp Doughboy on Governors Island. I had not been on the island all summer, working as I have in northern Manhattan at Grant’s Tomb since early June. It was so good to see and catch up with many of the rangers and volunteers I have known for almost . . . nine years . . . now. It is the people you meet and get to know who make it all worthwhile.

I had a good conversation with a friend on the ferry boat over about John Purroy Mitchel, the subject of my talk later in the morning. In the late 1900s, before himself becoming the city’s chief administrator, Mitchel worked with Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. to clean up the city, with a special focus on Tammany Hall. In a small bit of serendipity we noted that the Battery Maritime Building from which the ferry had taken off was itself built by Mayor McClellan in 1908-09, a few years after his split from Tammany. The thousands of people who cross the harbor every week pass the tablet you see above without giving it a second thought. Mitchel was a natural ally for Mac in the endeavor to take down Tammany, and while the two were not wholly successful in taming the Tiger they did put a serious dent in its power and influence. Both former mayors joined the armed services when the United States joined the fight, with Major Mitchel killed stateside in a flight accident and Lieutenant Colonel McClellan going to France.

John Mitchel, Irish nationalist

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Irish nationalist John Mitchel was put on trial in 1848 and eventually sentenced to “transportation” to Tasmania. He escaped to New York City and eventually moved South to support the Confederate cause. Seventy years later his grandson would be killed in a military training exercise getting ready to go to France to fight in the First World War.

Over the past few days I have been drafting the outline for my talk at next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. When I have more details I will share them here. Some may recall that in early July I wrote a piece for Roads to the Great War for the 100th anniversary of his death. Space constraints prevented me from going deeper into the Mitchell family than I would have liked. JP Mitchel was the grandson and namesake of famed Irish nationalist John MItchel. Mitchel the Elder was born in 1815 and put on trial by the British in 1848 when Ireland was in turmoil during the failed European revolutions of that year. He was sentenced to exile–what at the time was called “transportation”–to the Australian outpost Van Diemen’s Land, what we today call Tasmania. There on the Van Diemen penal colony too was Thomas Francis Meagher.

Mitchel and Meagher independently escaped to New York City. Mitchel ended up Brooklyn, living on Union Street and working as a journalist when he wrote his memoir Jail Journal; or Five Years in British Prisons. As the secession crisis heat up he eventually took his family down south, first to Tennessee and as the war went on to Richmond. Mitchel is testimony to the notion that life and humans are complicated; throughout his life he remained engaged in the Irish freedom struggle but was a staunch defender of slavery and the Confederacy. Mitchel was all in for the Confederate cause and all three of his sons served. Ironically two of the boys fought against the Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg in December 1862. One of Mitchel’s sons was killed in Pickett’s Charge near the Codori farm and another died while commanding Fort Sumter in 1864. The third, James, was wounded several times and lost an arm. Mitchel worked as a journalist for several Southern papers supporting President Davis. Ulysses S. Grant because a frequent foil after the general moved east in 1864. As the war wound down Mitchel escaped Richmond with Jefferson Davis’s entourage but was eventually captured and held at Fort Monroe before being released late in 1865. He soon became an editor with Benjamin and Fernando Wood’s New York Daily News, a Democratic vehicle that had given Lincoln much grief during the war and afterward turned it wrath on Reconstruction.

Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (center in top hat) and Cardinal John Murphy Farley reviewing St Patrick’s Day parade, March 17, 1914

John Purroy Mitchell was born in the Bronx in 1879, four years after his grandfather’s death. For reasons that are not clear to me, JP Mitchel was raised Catholic whereas his grandfather had been a Presbyterian. These were not small matters in Irish and Irish-American communities. I am assuming the Catholicism came from his mother’s side; the Purroys were Catholics who had come to New York City from Venezuela. I’m not going to rehash the Mitchel story here, though I probably will go into it more over the coming week as we get closer to Camp Doughboy. By the time he became mayor of New York City in January 1914 John Purroy Mitchel was thoroughly engaged in the Reform movement to clean up government. When war came later that year he was one of the earliest advocated for American Preparedness. It is intriguing to think of Mitchel being so actively engaged in the Preparedness Movement. Many Irish and Irish-Americans supported the Germans because they were fighting the British.

Like his grandfather during the American Civil War however, John Purroy Mitchel was all in for the Allied cause, eventually giving his own life on that Louisiana air field in July 1918. The world is indeed a complicated place.

(top image from The Citizen uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Domer48; bottom, Library of Congress)

Ulysses S. Grant III, 1881-1968

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Civil War centennial, Governors Island, Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Ulysses S. Grant III, Winfield Scott Hancock

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Ulysses S. Grant III died fifty years ssgo today. To put his long life in some perspective: Grant was present at Mount McGregor when his grandfather died in July 1885; graduated with Douglas MacArthur in the West Point Class of 1903; worked as a White House aid in the Theodore Roosevelt Administration; married Secretary of State Elihu Root’s daughter in 1907; served in the Pacific and Caribbean during the Philippine and Cuban Insurrections, at Veracruz and on the Mexican Border during the Punitive Expedition, in France during the Great War, and in Paris after the Armistice where he helped write the Treaty of Versailles. All before his fortieth birthday.

The 1907 Root-Grant wedding was a major event in Washington society and covered by newspapers across the country.

A few weeks ago at the Tomb I chanced upon a well-known figure from the Civil War blogosphere who grimaced when I mentioned that this month marks the anniversary of Grant III’s death. I wasn’t surprised and cannot say I blame him; Grant is today best known as the first chairman of the doomed United States Civil War Centennial Commission. Many readers will know that the Civil War centennial did not proceed smoothly, coming as it did—not coincidentally—during the Civil Rights Movement. President Eisenhower signed the enabling paperwork creating the Centennial Commission in 1957, the same year that Little Rock High School was desegregated. Grant turned seventy-six the year he assumed the chairmanship of the organization he led for the next four tumultuous years. His reputation, for all he had done over his long career, has never recovered.

Writing in his 2012 book American Oracle David Blight offers a scathing indictment of Grant as “a staunchly conservative superpatriot and racist.” When one looks at U.S. Grant III’s life from a certain perspective it is difficult to argue with Blight’s assessment and I won’t defend Grant or his record in their entirety here. That said, a more charitable interpretation might be that Grant, born in 1881, reflected the views and attitudes of most white Americans born in his era. He toiled for decades in a U.S. Army officered with the sons and grandsons of many of the men who had once fought against his grandfather. Who among us can say with certainty what we would have done had we lived in another place and time?

After the Great War and Versailles Peace Conference Grant held numerous military posts in the 1920s, oversaw part of the Civil Conservation Corps in the early years of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, and quietly prepared for war with other officers of the Second Corps Area on Governors Island in the late 1930s while Germany and Japan rattled their sabers. Too old for combat service when Pearl Harbor finally came, he coordinated civil defense for the continental United States during the Second World War. Grant’s aptitude as a civil engineer and apparent interest in urban planning led him over this long career to many other positions, including a stint after World War II as a member of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission in Washington D.C. and president of the American Planning and Civic Association.

All of these accomplishments were in the end tarnished by that 1957-61 stint as Centennial Commission chairman. Had Grant and his allies had their way, the Civil War centennial would have been filled with Civil War rrenactments emphasizing the courage  and fighting spirit of Union and Confederate men and officers while studiously avoiding the war’s causes, consequences and unfinished business. The controversies are too detailed to go into here. Things began escalating however until in 1961 New Jersey officials publicly called on Grant to resign. There was pressure from other quarters as well. Grant held on for several months until eventually submitting his resignation to President Kennedy in September 1961. The pretense was his wife Edith Root Grant’s health and indeed Mrs. Root had been ailing for some time, confined now to the family summer house in Clinton, New York for many months as her health deteriorated. General Grant was sincere in his concern for his wife, but the public pressure regarding the Centennial Commission was intense and growing. Mrs. Grant died in 1962 and her widower husband carried on for six more years.

President and Bess Truman with Ulysses S. Grant III (far right), Admiral William Leahy (third from left) and others at the Lincoln Memorial, February 12, 1948.

His grandfather, General and President Ulysses S. Grant, in a very real sense had died at the right time in 1885; with the war over for two decades, Americans, especially white Americans, were eager to move on. Reconstruction had ended eight years previously and General Grant’s funeral was the reconciliationist event that organizer Winfield Scott Hancock, the 60,000 marchers, hundreds of thousands of attendees, and millions of other Americans had wanted it to be. President Grant, try though he did, was unable to heal the nation’s wounds during his administration; the intransigence he faced was just too great. Ironically it was the failures of Grant and the country that contributed to his grandson’s resignation nearly a century later.

Ulysses S. Grant too died during a decisive moment in American history. His passing came on the third day of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when the party met in the tense August heat of Chicago. With the Vietnam War going poorly and after the many assassinations and riots that had already taken place that year, civil unrest was almost inevitable. We still face the fallout from those tragic days. Much of the worst of it came on August 28, when police and protesters clashed in a violent conflict broadcast on network television and watched live by tens of millions people. Ulysses S. Grant III died at the family home in Clinton, New York the following day.

(images/top, Library of Congress; bottom, National Archives)

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.