We got hit by the big storm over last weekend and, as often happens in our neighborhood, a tree was blown over, taking out the power to three homes. But, to safely work on the power outage, PG&E shut down the whole neighborhood. Sitting in the dark, with no heat, did not seem like the best way to pass a Sunday, even though it was in the 50s outside, so we decamped and went out to a late lunch at La Viga, my favorite upscale Mexican restaurant.
After the distraction of a seafood stew for lunch, we still had a Christmas tree to take down and wanted to go home and get busy. In our new interconnected world, all we had to do was check the PG&E website to get all the details of the power outage and its repair which is handy and would have been even handier if they said we had power. But we still didn’t (although it was on the schedule). We decided to go see a movie because…what else are you going to do on a rainy Sunday. Hidden Figures was on our short list and was just at the right time, so Hidden Figures is was. We were not disappointed.
Hidden Figures is sort of an old-fashioned movie, the kind with a happy ending – wherein the white bosses redeem themselves – that you know is coming. Getting to the ending, however, is a rough journey. The movie centers on three black woman Katherine G. Johnson played by Taraji P. Henson, Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, and Mary Jackson played by Janelle Monae, who worked for NASA as computers in an era when engineers often did the conceptional engineering but the complex and tedious math was done by people called “computers”.
This happy ending is one of those happy endings that leave the audience teary-eyed and it left me a little ashamed and embarrassed as a white privileged male. While this is an uplifting movie about three “colored” women, like any movie about people of color in the 50s and 60s, it is really about race, prejudice, institutionalized segregation, and our ugly past that has only somewhat been diluted in the ensuing years. There are very few white heroes in this movie – duh! – with the notable exception of John Glenn, and the story the movie tells about the interaction between Glenn and “the smart one” is, according to all accounts I can find online, true.
The opening sequence is about the fear that every black person has of the very police whose sworn duty is to protect them. This is 1961 or 1962 in the Jim Crow South and prejudice is institutionalized but that fear of the police, if one is black, sadly is still just common sense anywhere in the United States. Towards the end of the film, one of the white women supervisors, in talking to a black woman who should be a supervisor, says “I have nothing against you” and the black woman answers, “And I believe you believe that”. If all this makes Hidden Figures seem like a downer, it isn’t. The movie is fun, interesting, and touching while feeling very real. I highly recommend it, it is one of the best movies we have seen in the last year.
After the movie, the rain continued and we still had no power so we had a light dinner and returned to the multiplex to see Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jeniffer Lawrence. Passengers is gorgeous, a couple of the special effects are especially good, and Jennifer Lawrence is transcendent but, in the end, it was not what I had hoped.
As an aside, Michele says that I always think Jenifer Lawrence is transcendent which is pretty true, but, in Passengers, her acting is luminous, even for her. End aside.
After Passengers we still didn’t have power so we just went home and climbed into bed. We woke the next morning to a warm house with power, only slightly inconvenienced.
General Ulysses S. Grant first came to Washington 150 years ago, on March 8, 1864. It had been a long journey, starting, I suppose you could say, when Grant had resigned from the Army about ten years before under the cloud of being a drunkard. He was stationed at Fort Humboldt which, at that time, was near the end of the world. Grant had been drinking heavily and with his resignation, his Army career was pretty much in shambles.
Back home, he tried to make a living, but not very successfully. With his wife, Julia, he settled on property that had belonged to her family near St. Louis. Grant tried farming, calling the farm Hardscrabble. He was a failure. Among other things, he hired “free men of color” and was criticized by his white neighbors for overpaying them. He tried selling firewood door to door. He barely eked out a living. When the Civil war started, in 1861, Grant was working, as a clerk, for his younger brother.
As an aside, at some point, Julia had been given a slave, William Jones, by her father (the whole idea of giving another human being away as a gift seems so bizarre to my naive, 2014, mind, Happy Birthday, dear daughter, here is a human being for you to own). I guess Mr. Jones became Ulysses Grant’s by community property, but , however it happened, when Grant could no longer afford to provide for Jones, when he desperately needed the money, he freed William Jones rather than selling him. Grant signed the manumission papers in March of 1859. He was a Mensch. End aside.
In his book, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, Major General J. F. C. Fuller tells what happened next. In the winter of 1861, a young merchant of Galena roused by the conditions of the day to a sense of patriotism began drilling his company of militiamen and, one morning, as it happened, he found himself in front of the leather store of Grant Brothers. A wrong word of command caused a confuse opening in the ranks when, hidden away behind the soldiers, was seen a little man seated on a packing box. Then it occurred to the young merchant that this was Captain Grant , late of the Regular Army. He asked him to take charge of his company, and handed him his sword. Grant buckled it on and stepped out in front of the men. “As he drew his blade from the scabbard and it flashed in the sunlight, his whole nature seemed transformed and to his fellow townsmen was revealed the fact that here was a man who understood the business of war”.
During the Mexican War, Grant had distinguished himself. He was one of those rare individuals who did better – much better – under stress. He knew war was coming and he volunteered to go back into the Regular Army if he were given a field command. He was not only turned down, but, when he traveled to Major General George B. McClellan’s Headquarters in Cincinnati, McClellan wouldn’t even see him. When Napoleon was asked what characteristic was most desirable in a General, he answered Luck, and Grant was very lucky. He didn’t know it at the time, but not being able to meet McClellan, was Grant’s first lucky break.
Grant stayed in Galena, out of sight in the backwaters of the war, training volunteer Union recruits before they were formed into units. He became very good at it, and with the help of his Congressman, Grant was put in charge of an unruly regiment, the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry, as a Colonel. In August, backdated to May, he was promoted to Brigadier General, part of a series of promotions as troops were being called up. It was the best break he could get and Colonel Grant knew it, telling his wife, Julia, the safety of the country, to some extent, and my reputation and that of our children greatly depends upon my acts.
At the end of the year, Brigadier General Grant was involved in what he thought would be a small skirmish. It was the first time he had led troops into battle and the responsibility terrified him. In his memoirs, he says
At the time of which I now write we had no transportation and the country about Salt River was sparsely settled, so that it took some days to collect teams and drivers enough to move the camp and garrison equipage of a regiment nearly a thousand strong, together with a week’s supply of provision and some ammunition. While preparations for the move were going on I felt quite comfortable; but when we got on the road and found every house deserted I was anything but easy. In the twenty-five miles we had to march we did not see a person, old or young, male or female, except two horsemen who were on a road that crossed ours. As soon as they saw us they decamped as fast as their horses could carry them.
I kept my men in the ranks and forbade their entering any of the deserted houses or taking anything from them. We halted at night on the road and proceeded the next morning at an early hour. Harris had been encamped in a creek bottom for the sake of being near water. The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet. As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted.
The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.
For Grant, everything was a lesson. The first time he lead troops into battle, the enemy had fled. In November 1861, leading 3,114 troops, he captured Fort Belmont. Fuller says that it was a amateur job and he lists the mistakes Grant made. The extraordinary thing, though, as Fuller points out, Grant recognized those mistakes and corrected them in the next battle.
Early in 1862, on February 11th through the 15th, Grant lead an Army of 24,531 in an attack of Fort Donelson, pinning the Confederate Army in the fort. During a lull in the fighting, Grant left the battle to meet with Naval Flag Officer Andrew Foote to coordinate a bombardment. Grant neglected to name a temporary commander and the Confederate forces almost escaped. He came back just in time to prevent a disaster. It was a mistake that Grant never made again.
On April 6 of the same year, at Pittsburgh Landing, a nondescript dock on the Tennessee River, Grant was attacked by Confederate General Sidney Johnson. The attack was a complete surprise and Grant failed to have his troops – most of whom were raw recruits – dug in, nor had he sent out patrols to find the enemy. It was Sunday, a warm spring morning with the orchards in bloom and the forest floor carpeted with violets – many people remembered that birds were singing in the trees – and it was a bloodbath. The Confederate Army almost drove Grant’s Army back into the Tennessee River and probably would have if Johnson hadn’t been killed and his replacement failed to press his advantage.
When Grant was attacked, he had an Army of 48,894 men. Somewhere around 10,000 deserted, and that night, it turned colder with a heavy rain. Several of Grant’s generals suggested a retreat. When Grant wouldn’t even consider a retreat, they got Sherman to talk to him. As the Confederate soldiers slept in the abandoned Union camps and the exhausted Union soldiers huddled with their back to the Tennessee River, Sherman found Grant, hoping to convince him to retreat. He was sitting under an oak tree in the heavy rain, his hat pulled down, in the darkness, alone, smoking a cigar. Later, Sherman would say, some wise and sudden instinct not to mention retreat came over him. Instead, he said, Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we? Grant took a puff on his cigar and serenely replied, Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.
During the night, Grant consolidated his forces and was reinforced with troops that had not arrived in time for the battle of the 6th. He attacked at dawn with about 45,000 troops, before the Confederates could get ready and, after hard fighting all day, drove the Confederates from the field. Up until then, it was the bloodiest battle on the North American continent with about 24,000 men killed and wounded. The nation was shocked, on both sides, and Grant was almost fired (and probably would have been if Lincoln hadn’t interceded, saying I need this man, he fights). With no sense of irony, the battle was named after a local church, Shiloh.
A year later, Grant directed the brilliant blitzkrieg that captured the Citadel of Vicksburg so that, as Lincoln said, The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. And then there was Chattanooga in late October and November. Union troops had been badly mauled at the Battle of Chickamauga in September and driven back into Chattanooga where they were pinned down, being starved to death. Grant was in New Orleans where he had a horse fall on his leg after it slipped on some trolly tracks. He could barely walk when he got a message to meet an official of the war Department in Louisville.
To back up a bit, General Ulysses S. Grant was an unprepossessing guy, he was short at 5’8″ and slight – he played Desdemona in a production of Othello put on by his barracks in St Louis – he often favored wearing a private’s uniform with his rank pinned on the shoulder, and always seemed sort of rumpled. He was crazy in love with his wife, Julia, and saw her when ever he could; they would sit next to each other and hold hands.
On the way to Louisville, Grant was traveling with Julia and his youngest son, Jesse. He was accompanied by his Chief of Staff, John Rawlins, and his personal Field Surgeon, General Kittoe, probably because of his injured leg. What ever the reason, in Louisville, to everybody’s surprise, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton got on the train. Stanton had never met Grant, but he immediately rushed over to General Kittoe, saying, Secretary Stanton, General Grant. You may not recognize me, but I would know the hero of Donaldson and Vicksburg anywhere. The embarrassed Kittoe kept nodding towards Grant as Stanton pumped his arm, but Stanton did not get the hint, until Grant stepped forward to introduce Kittoe as a member of his staff. Stanton, embarrassed, apologized saying I’m sorry General Grant, having no photographs to recognize you by, I made a mistake. Grant disarmed the situation with It seems Mr. Secretary that many people are mistaken when they first meet me. They expect some mythological warrior and instead find a crumbled old soldier.
Stanton had come west to promote Grant. He was to command all the Armies in the West. Much later, after he had met Grant, Lincoln told William Stoddard Well…I hardly know what to think of him, altogether. He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw. Why, he makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe two or three times he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. It’s about so all around. The only evidence you have that he’s in any place in that he makes things git! Where he is, things move! In a way that is what happened at Chattanooga; a new supply route was opened, the troops fed and provisioned, more troops brought in to cover the flanks, and the same infantry that had been so badly defeated at Chickamauga, charged up Missionary Ridge with a vengeance, to destroy General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee.
But that was all 150 years ago last year and the year before that. Now, 150 years ago, Grant was being brought to Washington to become the commander of all military forces. George Washington’s rank of Lieutenant General had being revived and it was going to be given to him. Again he took the train, again it was a regular train, and he had to travel for four days to get to to Washington. Except for Fred, his oldest son, Grant was alone.
When he checked into Willard’s Hotel, he must have been especially travel-weary and unprepossessing. He looked just like a crumbled old soldier, probably out of a job – there were lots of Generals without jobs in Washington – and Willard’s was the best hotel in town. The clerk told Grant that they only had a room in the back on the top floor (this was before elevators). Grant said fine – or something Grantian, I have no idea what – and signed in U.S. Grant & Son, Galena, Illinois. When the clerk turned the register around and saw the name, he suddenly remembered that there was a much better room available.
A little more than a month from now, 150 years ago, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant went south to take over direct command of The Armies of the United States. Lincoln wrote him, If there is anything wanting which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now with a brave army, and a just cause, may God sustain you. Grant answered, The confidence you express for the future and satisfaction for the past in my military administration is acknowledged with pride. It shall be my earnest endeavor that you and the country shall not be disappointed….I have been astonished at the readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded, without even an explanation being asked. Should my success be less than I desire and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you.
In a little more than a year from now, 150 years ago, the American Civil War would be over.
In May, 2008, five years ago, Michele and I didn’t visit Champion Hill. We got close, we got to Vicksburg, but we didn’t get to Champion Hill. Today, one hundred and fifty years ago, on May 16th, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant did.
He attacked the Confederate Army of General John Pemberton there. That battle, eventually, led to the fall of the Confederate fortress of Vicksburg, the separation of the South into two unconnected halves, the re-connection of the Midwest with the sea, and – I think – the end of the Confederacy. Lincoln said it best, We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference.
It was one of, if not the greatest, military campaigns in our history. Grant was behind enemy lines and outnumbered by almost two to one. All this, in an area that was swampy and mosquito infested. When Michele and I were there – in 2008 on a pilgrimage – we didn’t even want to leave the paved roads. But Grant had been moving constantly since he and his army had crossed the Mississippi on April 3oth, two weeks before.
To distract and confuse the enemy, Grant had ordered two diversionary actions. One of them, Col. Ben Grierson’s raid, was featured in the New York Times a couple of days ago. Grierson made a 16 day, 600 mile, raid behind enemy lines. It was audacious, and typical of Grant, and it succeeded in diverting much of the southern cavalry – the eyes and ears of the army at that time – away from Grant’s Army.
When he crossed the Mississippi, Grant was deep in the delta flatlands – the Plantation South – and, as he captured territory, he freed slaves. Later, many of those slaves became Union soldiers, and some were immediately helpful to the Union. Without their help, Grant would have been blind; he didn’t know the country and he had no maps. As an aside that amuses me, Grant also purchased, according to his son – freed? liberated? captured? according to others – a horse from the plantation of Joseph Davis, Jefferson Davis’ brother. Grant renamed the horse Jeff Davis and rode him, along with Cincinnati, for much of the war. End of asides.
Because he couldn’t attack Vicksburg directly, Grant moved east to cut off the city’s supply line. In doing so, he cut off all connection to his own base. Now he was alone, outnumbered, and surrounded. In his memoirs, Grant says, I therefore determined to move swiftly towards Jackson, destroy or drive any force in that direction and then turn upon Pemberton. But by moving against Jackson, I uncovered my own communication [and supply lines]. So I finally decided to have none–to cut loose altogether from my base and move my whole force eastward. I then had no fears for my communications, and if I moved quickly enough could turn upon Pemberton before he could attack me in the rear.
It was a blitzkrieg if I can use that word with an army mostly walking and using muledrawn wagons, oxcarts, and horses pulling buggies. According to Major-General J F C Fuller, an early theorist of modern armored warfare, Grant’s tremendous energy electrified his men, everywhere was there activity….reconnaissances were sent out daily to examine the roads and country, and foraging parties swarmed over the cultivated areas collecting supplies….Nothing was left undone which would speed up the advance, and assist in maintaining it at maximum pressure once the move forward was ordered.
On May 14th, two weeks after he crossed the Mississippi, in country he did not know and without maps, Grant took Jackson, about 60 miles from where he crossed the river, and as he says in his memoirs, his troops hoisted the National flag over the rebel capital of Mississippi.
One more aside, in the Not everybody appreciates Grant’s humor department, the night after capturing, Jackson, Mississippi, Grant stayed at the best hotel in town, The Bowman House (in the same room that General Joseph Johnson had stayed in, for free, the night before). When the owner demanded payment, Grant’s aide-de-camp said No, but Grant agreed with the hotel owner and insisted on paying for the room…in Confederate money. End aside.
Grant then turned towards Vicksburg from the east, and 27 miles west of where he slept two days before, he met Pemberton at Champion Hill. Again, Grant in his memoirs, The battle of Champion’s Hill lasted about four hours, hard fighting, preceded by two or three hours of skirmishing, some of which almost rose to the dignity of battle….We had in this battle about 15,000 men absolutely engaged. Our loss was 410 killed, 1,844 wounded and 187 missing. The south lost 4,082 men and were driven back into Vicksburg never to recover.
On our pilgrimage of only one day, we only had time to drive south to the area where Grant crossed the Mississippi and tour the Vicksburg Battlefield itself. Our guide for the day told us that Champion Hill was too far away (maybe he was influenced by our reluctance to leave the road earlier). He didn’t say Keep moving, there is nothing to see there, keep moving but that was the drift. Now I am sorry that I missed it, even if there was nothing to see, and I want to say that I am sorry that I will not be able to attend the 150th Anniversary, but that is not true, if I did go, all I would do is gloat.
But we did have time to get a Chinese dinner in Vicksburg as is our ritual when traveling, and we did have time to see the Mighty Mississippi. From the bluff overlooking the River, we confirmed, as Lincoln said, that The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.
And Thanks to Michele who really helped write this.
This morning, I heard somebody on the radio talk about fossilized hubris, but then I realized that was not what they said. It was only what I heard, connecting audio dots that weren’t there. Now I have fallen in love with that term, even if it is imaginary. It reminds me of the ruins of an old Mississippi plantation that Michele and I visited in 2008. The plantation had been captured by the Union during General U. S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign and that campaign has been on my mind because it started about 150 years ago, in April 1863.
Michele and I went to Vicksburg in 2008 to see some Civil War Battlefields in which Grant had been the Union commander. Grant chose to not to attack the citadel of Vicksburg directly, instead going down river to a location near the, now, abandoned plantation. Standing on the parapets of Vicksburg – The Gibraltar of the West – overlooking the Mississippi, it was easy to see why.
Later, standing in the empty, quiet, ruins of the Plantation, sweating in the late spring sun, and surrounded by what would be called jungle anywhere else, we could feel how difficult even that road of attack must have been. But, standing in the abandoned ruins, the year that Barack Obama, a black man, would be elected President of the United States – in 2008 – was a very good feeling. It was like standing in fossilized hubris.
General Order No. 11, issued by my hero – General Ulysses S. Grant – was the most notorious anti-Semitic official order in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”
I first read about Order #11 in Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton – maybe, twenty five years ago – and I just sort of ignored it. Ignored it as in in pretend it wasn’t there. I sort considered it a mote in Grant’s otherwise perfect veneer. I did know the root of Grant’s Order #11, but I didn’t know the aftermath except that Lincoln immediately cancelled it. That mote as well as its aftermath are the subject of an interesting article by Jonathan D. Sarna. It turns out that the story ended very differently than it started.
General Grant had a very strained relationship with his ill-tempered father, Jesse Grant, who owned a tanning company for which Ulysses Grant worked before the war when he was out of work and desperate. He hated the work and, by all accounts, he did not get along with his belligerent and overbearing father. Father Jesse was also a little bit of a operator, for lack of a better word, and – in December of 1862, twenty one, or so, months after Grant had left his employment – visited his son, now Major General Grant, hero of Fort Donaldson. Father Jesse accompanied several members of the Mack family of Cincinnati. They were Jewish clothing manufacturers trying to purchase cotton and they had formed a secret partnership with Jesse Grant. He was to get 25 percent of their profits for his work acting as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton.”
According to an eyewitness, General Grant was upset and embarrassed at his father’s attempt to profit from his son’s new military status. He took his anger at his father out on the Macks and enlarged that to all Jews expelling them from his war zone. Once again, the Jews were being treated as a different and separate class to be discriminated against.
Even though the order was quickly cancelled, Sarna points out that the memory of what his wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order” continued to haunt Grant to his death….the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. Grant apologized publicly and privately told people that he been wrong.
In this day and age – probably every day and age, actually – lots of people apologize for some stupid thing they said or did with a lame statement like If I offended you, I am sorry or I may have used the wrong wording, but my point was.… Grant apologized and changed his behavior. As president, he made more Jewish appointments than all previous presidents put together. In an effort to help the plight of the Jews of Romania, who were being terrorized by Russian pogroms, he appointed a Jewish ambassador to Romania. As president, he attended the dedication of a synagogue further legitimizing and empowering American Judaism.
Grant cultivated friendships with some of the foremost Jewish leaders of the time, inviting them to the White House and entertaining them socially. All this was during a time when much of the United States was becoming reactionary. It was a time of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a time when the Christian National Reform Association was making headway into getting a Constitutional Amendment to make the United States a Christian Nation. It was a time, much like today, when the forces trying to turn the clock back were gaining power.
Grant believed in the Constitution – took it’s deeper meaning seriously – fought to save it, and then became the first Civil Rights president. The ONLY Civil Rights president for almost seventy-five years. Twenty three years after General Order #11, at his funeral march – witnessed by over a million people – the pallbearers included Union generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan, Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner, and Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. The following day, the Jewish Record reported Seldom before, has the kaddish been repeated so universally for a non-Jew as in this case. General Grant would have been proud.
We got hit by the big storm over last weekend and, as often happens in our neighborhood, a tree was blown over, taking out the power to three homes. But, to safely work on the power outage, PG&E shut down the whole neighborhood. Sitting in the dark, with no heat, did not seem like the best way to pass a Sunday, even though it was in the 50s outside, so we decamped and went out to a late lunch at La Viga, my favorite upscale Mexican restaurant.
