Category Archives: Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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)

≈ 2 Comments

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

≈ Comments Off on Ulysses S. Grant III, 1881-1968

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)

No more of those hideous monuments!

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Chester A. Arthur, General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Monuments and Statuary, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Winfield Scott Hancock

≈ Comments Off on No more of those hideous monuments!

Puck magazine, August 19, 1885

I hope everyone is having a good weekend. Blogging will continue to be light for the next week as I squeeze out some last days of R&R before the academic year begins a week from tomorrow. We visited the Newseum in Washington yesterday. I will have more to say about it when I get back from vacation. Today I wanted to share this centerfold from the August 19, 1885 edition of Puck magazine. Grant had died three weeks previously and his funeral was now eleven days in the past when this hit the newsstands. Literally within hours after his death, discussion had begun about the size, location and type of monument he might receive. There was no shortage of ideas; suggestions ranging from the sublime to the surreal were pouring in from across the country.

It is difficult to tell how cheeky or sincere the Puck editors are being here with their recommendation in the lower right hand corner. My favorite part of the cartoon is the statue of William Seward on the left. The statue still stands where it was dedicated in Madison Square Park in 1876. President Grant himself donated to the construction of the statue. Chester Arthur, Grant’s appointee as Collector of the Port of New York, and Winfield Scott Hancock both attended the Seward dedication and also participated in Grant’s funeral nine years later, a few weeks before this Puck cartoon’s release. Arthur himself was the first leader of the Grant Monument Association but, like Hancock, died in 1886 the year after Grant did. The Grant Monument Association and American people would spend the next twelve years hashing out the scope and design of what became Grant’s Tomb.

(image/Library of Congress)

Sunday morning coffee

12 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Style, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

≈ Comments Off on Sunday morning coffee

Ulyyses S. Grant sent his measurements to Brooks Brothers in August 1861 after being promoted to brigadier general. Oddly the tailors did not keep the entire note, instead only saving the portion describing the fit and proportions.

I’m listening to jazz and having my morning coffee before heading out the door for Grant’s Tomb. The sun seems to be shining. I thought we would stay with the Brooks Brothers theme one more day. What we see here is a letter in Ulysses S. Grant’s hand to Brooks Brothers giving his measurements. The letter is from August 1861 and is currently on display at the exhibition I mentioned yesterday at Grand Central Terminal. Grant learned of his promotion when he read about it in the St. Louis newspapers while stationed in the Western Theater. His rise had been meteoric. Grant left the Army in April 1854 and had seven full years in the wilderness before rejoining the military after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Now before the end of the summer he would be a brigadier general. Grant was never one for punctiliousness in military dress, he would famously wear an enlisted man’s blouse later in the war, but it must have been nice to order and put on this general’s uniform that we see here.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Grant rocks the ZZ Top beard wearing his new Brooks Brothers-tailored uniform, Cairo Illinois, September 1861.

The 1865 Colfax Expedition

09 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Law Olmsted, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), National Park Service, Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

≈ Comments Off on The 1865 Colfax Expedition

In late June 1864, with the country still reeling from Ulysses S. Grant’s bloody Overland Campaign, President Lincoln signed legislation granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California. I speak in my manuscript about how forward-thinking many were even in the worst depths of the war about what might come afterward, hence the passage of the Pacific Railroad, Homestead, and Land-Grant College bills as early as 1862. The 1864 Yosemite Act was a part of that optimism. Eight years after this, President Grant put Yellowstone under federal control. In between, in the summer of 1865, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax led an expedition out west just after the Civil War to review the situation. Three years after all this Colfax became Grant’s running mate and then served four years as vice-president from 1869-73.

Frederick Law Olmsted (second from left front row) read his report on Yosemite and Mariposa Grove to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax and his entourage on 9 August 1865. Olmsted, his wife Mary (seated next to him), and the expedition then sat for this image. With the Civil War finally over, Americans were thinking of the possibilities for the future.

Frederick Law Olmsted left his position as secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in mid-1863 and took a position in California managing the Mariposa mining estate. There he was horrified by the corruption and environmental depredations he saw. A bright spot was that he was eventually placed on a committee to examine how the state of California might preserve Yosemite and Mariposa. Back in Washington on 14 April 1865 Grant and Colfax both begged out of attending My American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with President and Mrs. Lincoln. That same day Lincoln spoke to Colfax excitedly about the Speaker’s upcoming trip out west. As Colfax remembered it, Lincoln told him, “Mr. Colfax, I want you to take a message from me to the miners whom you visit. I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the Western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced.” Later that evening Booth shot Lincoln and the president died the next morning.

Colfax and his entourage headed west shortly after the president”s assassination and traveled many thousands of miles by various means, taking in what they saw and thinking optimistically about the possibilities for the reunified country. By early August they reached Yosemite and toured that beautiful valley along with the sequoias at Mariposa Grove. On 9 August 1865 Speaker of the House Colfax and others listened to Frederick Law Olmsted read his “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report,” the study that Olmsted and his team had written for state officials outlining how California might best preserve these sites. The state eventually did nt pursue many of the commission’s recommendations, deeming them too expensive and impractical. It was not a total loss. The Colfax Expedition helped lay the groundwork for President Grant’s signing in March 1872 of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act. It was the start of the environmental movement here in the United States. Yosemite and the great sequoias too eventually came under the management of the National Park Service.

(image by Carleton Watkins; Courtesy Yosemite National Park Research Library)

 

Margaret Suckley and the 27th Division

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in 27th (New York) Division, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Margaret L. Suckley, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

≈ 2 Comments

Yesterday a friend and I braved the heat and ventured to Roosevelt Island to visit Four Freedoms State Park, architect Louis Isadore Kahn’s tribute to our only four-term president and the man who gave the world so much of what many people sadly take for granted today. When I got home I finished Jean Edward Smith’s FDR, an outstanding biography I have been reading over the summer in addition to finishing my book manuscript and boning up on my U.S. Grant. (Last week I picked up a brand new hardcover copy of the same author’s Grant for $5 that I will get to in a few weeks.) This morning I have been going through copies of “Gas Attack,” the newspaper published by the 27th “New York” Division during the First World War. The men had published a previous newspaper called the “Rio Grande Rattler” when they were stationed on the Texas/Mexico border during the Punitive Expedition in 1916. The reason I say all this is because in pursuing “Gas Attack” I came across this extraordinary photography that includes Margaret L. Suckley.

Margaret Suckley was a volunteer with the 27th “New York” Division when the unit trained at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina in 1918. She went on to be a friend and confidant of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she met a few years after the war. The Elizabeth Suckley pictured here is presumably a sister or cousin.

The image we see here is from the May 4, 1918 edition, published at Camp Wadsworth and the last installment of the paper before the division shipped out to France. Suckley (the first vowel in her name rhymes with book) was one of the two dozen or so canteen women who provided refreshments to the men of the 27th Division. Most of these women were married and had spouses within the unit. Suckley though was not one of these. In 1918 when this photograph was taken she was 26 and unmarried. A few years earlier she had been a student at Bryn Mawr but for whatever reason her mother forced her to drop out before getting a degree. Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at this time but he and Suckley did not yet know each other; they would not meet until 1922. In the 23 years after that, until FDR’s death in April 1945, they would be confidants and close friends. She was one of the few people unafraid to tell Franklin when he was wrong. Margaret was one of the women present in Warm Springs when Roosevelt died.

(image/Gas Attack of the New York Division)

 

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

≈ 2 Comments

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, 1822-1885

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

≈ Comments Off on Ulysses S. Grant, 1822-1885

excerpt from July 23, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle on Grant’s death

What a special day it was yesterday at General Grant National Memorial (Grant’s Tomb) as we remembered the life and memory of the general and eighteenth president. It was an honor to read the Whitman poem and participate in the wreath laying and placement of the white roses. Frank Scaturro gave a very informative talk in the visitor center afterward. This event gets bigger every year and I am sure will continue to grow as the 2022 bicentennial of Grant’s birth gets closer and closer in the coming years.

Remembering Brooklyn’s G.A.R. Post 327

21 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by in Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), Memory, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

≈ 2 Comments

G.A.R. Post 327 marker, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

The Grand Army of the Republic was the premier fraternal organization for Union Civil War veterans. Returning soldiers founded the GAR just after the war and over the next several decades hundreds of thousands of men who had worn the Union blue joined posts across the nation to socialize, perform charitable works, and advocate for medical care and military pensions. One of the most active was Post 327 of Brooklyn, New York. Post 327 included men from such regiments as the 14th Brooklyn that fought at Antietam, Gettysburg, and elsewhere. The 327 also included many men who had served under Grant and Meade in the Overland Campaign and Siege of Petersburg, some of the toughest engagements of the war. These veterans marched and spoke regularly at Decoration Day commemorations, Fourth of July picnics, and other events, sometimes with Grant in attendance.

At Mount McGgregor on the morning of July 24, 1885, the day after the general died, representatives told Frederick Dent Grant that the post was changing its name to U.S. Grant Post 327 in tribute to their former commander. They were also in Mount McGregor to provide escort for General Grant as he made his way to his final resting place in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, men of U.S. Grant Post 327 participated in General Grant‘s funeral in 1885 and again at the dedication of the Tomb in 1897.

U.S. Grant Post 327 was still going strong in the early decades of the twentieth century, speaking to children at schools, marching in parades and, increasingly, symbolizing the passing of an era. As with other posts across the nation, their numbers were dwindling quickly until finally in the 1920s and 30s just a few remained. Many Civil War veterans who joined Post 327 are today buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Often these soldiers’ headstones are marked with circular tablets like the one we see here. I was in Green-Wood recently and wanted to share this image I took of a tablet marking a Union soldier’s headstone. Some of these markers are over a century old but, as we can see, are still quite legible. Note General Grant‘s likeness in the center of the tablet.

New York City, July 1868

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Andrew Johnson, Gettysburg, Horatio Seymour, New York City, Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Vicksburg

≈ Comments Off on New York City, July 1868

I would be remiss if I did not at least briefly mention that the Democratic National Convention began here in New York City 150 years ago today. This was the first presidential election since the end of the war, the assassination of Lincoln, and impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The Republicans had nominated Ulysses S. Grant in Chicago almost two months earlier. Grant would face the winner in the general election that fall. The Democratic field was wide open. President Johnson even sent a representative to take the pulse of the situation and see about maybe running. Few thought that Johnson would get the bid. Instead, George H. Pendleton of Ohio was the favorite coming in. Other leading prospects included Horatio Seymour of New York, Thomas A.Hendricks of Indiana, and Winfield Scott Hancock, one of the heroes of Gettysburg. The Democrats were meeting at Tammany Hall’s new wigwam on 14th Street that had been rushed into completion in time for the convention.

Very little actually happened at the wigwam on July 4, 1868. They did have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which was a Tammany Fourth of July tradition. There was some talk about holding meetings that evening but that was quickly scuttled because of the holiday. This was all taking place five years after the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. If you know your Gettysburg, you know that the Tammany regiment played a big role in that battle and has a prominent marker at the High Water Mark.

Most of the action that day took place a little farther south at the Cooper Institute. In a sort of shadow assembly, the Soldiers’ and sailors’ Convention was taking place there. Many former general were present including William B. Franklin and Henry Slocum. The preferred candidate here seemed to be Winfield S. Hancock. The South and West were widely represented at Cooper Union, just as they would be at the wigwam starting on July 5. In a precursor to the events that would transpire at the wigwam over the course of that hot week, Major General Ewing’s speech was a refutation of reconstruction.

In the next week I intend to go at least a little deeper into the convention held here in New York City 150 summer ago. Suffice it to say that the 1868 Democratic Convention was one of the most tragic and painful in American history. The only political gathering that may–may–have been worse in its ugliness was the convention in Chicago 100 years after it.

(top image/Library of Congress; bottom, title page of Ewing convention speech)