Retired dentist Bob Mulvihill and his wife, Roxy Lou, re-enactors, portray U.S. Grant and Julia Dent Grant. General and Mrs. U.S. Grant Appear at Civil War Round Table in Bay City
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Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and Julia Dent Grant, stopped by Bay City on their tour of the nation the other day.
"We are on our way to Chicago 'after the late unpleasantness' known as the Civil War," the general explained.
It just so happened that a group of about 50 folks interested in the Civil War were gathering at the Stein Haus, 1108 N. Water Street, so the general and Julia joined them.
Brandishing his ever-present long black cigar (he no longer smokes since contracting mouth cancer), the general took the crowd through his many career stops in the military that led to his recent election (1869) as the 18th President of the United States.
"I was the highest ranking officer in the U.S. since George Washington. And you folks might be interested in the fact that I spent two years at a post called Fort Wayne, in Detroit, Michigan.
"I am wearing this heavy wool dress uniform with a buff colored sash designating a staff officer. Julia is covered head to foot with multiple layers of petticoats." She explained to the crowd how her hair was bunched into a bun to cover her neck. Not an inch of flesh, other than her face, was exposed -- in the fashion of the day.
"Lis," or "Ulis," as Hiram Ulysses Grant was known as a boy, told of growing up in Georgetown, Ohio, about 15 miles upstream from Cincinnati. He described his family as of Scottish descent, arriving in the new land on the brig John and Mary in 1630 -- 10 years after the Mayflower landed.
"They never called me Hiram," he observed, and Simpson was not his middle name, as commonly believed -- it was his mother's maiden name adopted at West Point where a middle name was required. "I was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, but constant floods caused my father, a leather tanner, to move to higher ground 15 miles inland.
"As a boy I became an expert horseman: If I could get on the horse I could ride him. A nasty sorrel George Armstrong Custer gave me at West Point, that nobody else could ride, was tamed with a rap between the ears with a pistol.
"I attended the U.S. Military Academy because my father wanted me to, but I never wanted to be a soldier. My father, true to his Scottish heritage, found that West Point was free and there I could earn an engineering degree plus get a small stipend. Since I excelled in Math I thought I might be an instructor at the academy after graduation."
In the Mexican War, 1846-47, Lt. Grant served under a fellow soldier named Robert E. Lee, whom he would get to know better later in life. "I won a medal for taking apart a howitzer, taking it up a bell tower, reassembling it an commanding the field of battle.
"Posted to Detroit after the war, myself and Julia, who had married in the meantime, lived in a house on Fort Street. Assigned to Sackett's Harbor, New York, I became treasurer of the Sons of Temperance, an honor I would later famously live down.
"Then, in 1849, I was assigned to take a party of 700 prospectors across the Isthmus of Panama to reach San Francisco. At lonely Fort Humboldt in Oregon, myself and fellow soldiers passed a bottle of whiskey around to pass the time. That was a habit I had to break later on."
Resigning from the Army, he went to Julia's home town of St. Louis and tried various businesses without success, ending up cutting and selling timber for firewood. From a store in Galena, Illinois, he sold harness in demand for use on mules in the lead mines and began to smoke a clay pipe.
"Things were getting tense in the South and Lincoln called for volunteers, so I signed up for the Joe Davies Guard comprised of 80 young men. As a West Point graduate, they made me Captain and we marched to Springfield. I got recruited to a Springfield regiment and the men all hated their commander, so they made me colonel. It was the 21st Illinois Infantry and we headed to Cairo, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi.
"When the rebels saw us coming, they abandoned Fort Henry with hardly a shot fired. Them, two weeks later, Fort Donaldson was almost as easy. After those victories, I was the winningest general in the Union Army. Somebody gave me a box of cigars and they kept coming. I smoked 15-20 a day/
"I made a bad mistake and did not set perimeter pickets at Pittsburg Landing near Shiloh; the rebels caught us in our bedrolls; Don Carlos Buell bailed me out, but I never let that happen again.
"The Wilderness Campaign was dreadful with fires in all the trees and underbrush. At Vicksburg we mounted a siege and people were starving and living in caves until they capitulated. (By the way, Vicksburg didn't celebrate the Fourth of July until 1988.)
"During the war, somebody reported to Lincoln about my drinking. He said 'find out what he drinks and send a bottle to the other generals.' What did I drink? I.W. Harper Bourbon."
"We went to Appomattox where the war ended on the property of Wilbur McLean, who also had owned the farm where the war started at Bull Run. He moved 100 miles but never got away from the war. It began in his front yard and ended in his parlor."
"After the war I was elected President, with the help of Confederate Gen. "Pete" Longstreet, who was second cousin to Julia. Then I was hit with throat and mouth cancer and wrote my memoirs, finishing just six days before I died."
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