To travel the road that led to Union victory in the American Civil War, one need only follow in the footsteps of Ulysses S. Grant.
It was a long and painful road, traversing some of the most important and bloodiest battlefields of the conflict. At the same time, it transported the man who became the North’s most successful general from the miseries of poverty and failure to worldwide fame and the presidency of the United States.
For the modern-day traveler interested in this most consequential of U.S. military struggles, Grant’s odyssey makes for an illuminating journey, embracing both the Western and Eastern theaters of the war, the Midwest and the Deep South, and the nation’s capital besides.
At the beginning of the war, Grant was toiling in obscurity as a clerk in a Galena, Ill., leather shop–just as his most successful protege, William Sherman, was a St. Louis railroad executive who some thought mentally unbalanced.
The federal government instead first turned high command over to far more celebrated veteran officers, such as the “Napoleonic” George B. McClellan and John C. Fremont, famed as the “pathfinder” to the American West and Republican candidate for president in 1856.
The politically connected Fremont proved both incompetent and insubordinate. McClellan, for all his popularity, proved perhaps the most timid, lethargic, wasteful and useless commander of the war.
His replacements–Ambrose Burnside, John Pope, Joseph Hooker–were no improvement. Defeat followed defeat, until Abraham Lincoln at last in 1864 turned to the unpolished, hard-fighting, quiet-spoken man from the West, who had been steadily rolling back the Confederates in battle after battle.
There were those who opposed the appointment of Grant as commanding general on the grounds that he was a boozer with a penchant for incurring excessive casualties. But Lincoln said, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
Grant, like Sherman, understood that the key to defeating the Confederates, even the brilliant Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, lay not in winning set-piece textbook battles in the field but in grinding ahead until the enemy force was overwhelmed and destroyed.
To see the Civil War through Grant’s eyes, and more fully understand this highly unusual man, one should examine his life before the outbreak of the war at Ft. Sumter, S.C., in 1861 as well–starting with his birth in 1822 as the son of a humble tanner at Point Pleasant, Ohio, a settlement on the banks of the Ohio River.
Grant’s birthplace, a one-story, three-room cottage next to the tannery where his father worked, has been restored. Sent around the country on a railroad flatcar after Grant’s rise to national hero, it was returned to its original site and is now a local tourist attraction about 5 miles east of New Richmond.
Grant’s father had political connections, and secured his admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1839. Seventeen at the time, Grant had to be coerced into going, disliking the spartan regimen intensely, though he loved the beauty of the Hudson River setting. His academic record was undistinguished, and he graduated 21st in a class of 39.
Located just outside Highland Falls, N.Y., the U.S. Military Academy has tightened security restrictions and access is by arranged tour only. The visitor center and West Point Museum, however, are open to all.
Grant was easily the best horseman at the Point, if not the entire U.S. Army, but–the military being the military–he was sent to the infantry instead of the cavalry. He served in the Mexican War, where he came to respect a captain named Robert E. Lee and despise another future Confederate officer named Gideon Pillow. Grant distinguished himself in combat, particularly in the battle of Chapultepec.
In 1848, immediately after the war, Grant married his West Point roommate’s sister, Julia Dent, whom he had met and fallen in love with four years before. Grant was a very handsome young man, with many female admirers. Julia was very plain, with a tendency to crossed eyes, but intelligent, witty and highly self-reliant. His ardor for her was life-long. They were seen holding hands even in their 50s.
His closeness to her proved injurious to his military career. Stationed away from her and their then two children in distant California in 1852, Grant sought the solace of whiskey. This would occur again during the Civil War, when he became despondent over her absence and idled by inaction. He wasn’t a drunk in the common sense. For the most part, he suffered from an inability to hold his liquor, becoming inebriated after one or two drinks.
In 1854, with the strong encouragement of his stern commanding officer, Grant resigned from the Army (on the same day he’d been promoted to captain) and returned to his wife in St. Louis. She had inherited 80 acres of land southwest of the city, and Grant, with the help of friends, in 1855 built a four-room log cabin there that he called “Hardscrabble.”
Grant worked both his wife’s and her father’s farms, growing wheat, vegetables and fruit and selling cordwood in town, but failed to prosper. Julia stuck it out a few months, then returned to her family’s house, where she had four house servants–all slaves. Grant opposed slavery, but tolerated the arrangement for the sake of his wife.
Now fully restored, his cabin was moved about a mile from its original location and is now part of the Anheuser-Busch family’s Grant’s Farm theme park.
The Dent family home, a modest St. Louis “plantation” called White Haven where Grant and his family also lived at times, has been restored and preserved as the National Park District’s Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site.
In 1860, Grant, Julia and their now four children moved to Galena, where for $100 a year he rented a small, modest brick house and went to work in his father’s leather store at 145 Main St., serving customers from behind the counter as well as calling on others in Wisconsin and as far away as Minnesota. She left her slaves behind, hiring a house servant instead.
The first Grant house in Galena is not a public tourist attraction, but the family’s second one there, a handsome hilltop residence at 500 Bouthillier St. presented to them by grateful citizens at war’s end, is open to the public as the U.S. Grant Home State Historic Site.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, he offered his services to the War Department and Gen. George B. McClellan. Rebuffed, he instead turned to organizing and mustering Illinois volunteers, and was appointed colonel of the 21st Illinois infantry regiment in June, 1861.
The need for experienced officers was great. Grant was made brigadier general the next month and by February 1862 was a major general commanding a large Union force in perhaps the most vital section of the Western theater of war. Moving into Tennessee, Grant captured the Confederate bastion Ft. Henry on the Tennessee River and then laid siege to the more formidable Ft. Donelson, 10 miles away on the Cumberland River. Surrounding the Rebel troops, the only terms he offered his foe were those of “unconditional surrender,” acquiring the words as a lasting nickname matching his initials after the Confederates capitulated.
The victory not only opened two vital rivers for Union use as water highways into the South; it provided a morale boost for a nation whose Eastern generals had delivered nothing but failure, frustration and defeat. Grant was made a major general of volunteers.
Ft. Donelson is now a National Park Service National Battlefield, just outside Dover, Tenn. The view from the ramparts gives a good idea of the dangers and opportunities confronting Union gunboats in this endeavor. The Park Service site includes the Dover Hotel, scene of the famous Rebel surrender.
A jealous, disapproving superior, Gen. Henry Halleck, briefly deprived Grant of command, but it was restored in time for him to command at the bloody, two-day battle of Shiloh in April 1862 at a key point further up the Tennessee River near Mississippi. Under savage attack, Grant’s army nearly met defeat the first day, but reinforcements brought victory the next. Confederate commander Albert Sydney Johnston, perhaps the South’s best general, was killed in the bloody fighting, and the rebels retreated into Mississippi.
Halleck again pulled Grant out of action, but was transferred himself to Washington to become administrative commander of the Union forces, allowing Grant to resume command in the West.
The 4,000-acre Shiloh National Military Park includes the Shiloh National Cemetery and the famous Confederate Monument sculpture showing a woman representing “the South” surrendering a victory laurel wreath to “Death” and to “Night.”
Grant now moved to his next challenge, the blufftop city fortress of Vicksburg, Miss. The last Rebel stronghold on the Mississippi, it held the two major sections of the Confederacy together and prevented the Union from freely navigating the river. Considered impregnable, it was protected by a chain of forts and marshland on the south, east and north, and by the Mississippi on the west.
In one of the most brilliant maneuvers of the war, Grant brought a large portion of his army around the opposite shore of the river, taking them across to the south of Vicksburg. Though cut off from their northern base, Grant’s troops won two key battles on open ground east of Vicksburg, then closed in on the city. All this took months, but Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863–the same day Lee lost the battle of Gettysburg.
Vicksburg National Military Park is one of the best preserved and most interesting historic sites in the Park Service’s Civil War holdings, including 1,325 historic monuments and markers, 20 miles of reconstructed trenches and earthworks, a 16-mile tour road, an antebellum mansion, 144 emplaced cannon, the restored Union gunboat USS Cairo and the Vicksburg National Cemetery.
Given command of all the Union armies in the West, Grant was made a major general in the regular army. Injured in a fall from a horse, he was sidelined for the rest of the summer, but resumed active command of his forces that fall in time to lead them in the Nov. 22–25, 1863, Battle of Chattanooga. Fought at a key juncture of river and mountains in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, and famous for the hard combat on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga ended with the defeat of Rebel Gen. Braxton Bragg and the Union forces seizing the gateway to Georgia.
The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park includes the sites of both the Battle of Chattanooga and an earlier fight at nearby Chickamauga, as well as Lookout Mountain, after the Union victory one of the most famous landmarks of the war.
From there, Grant’s protege Sherman would launch his successful drive on Atlanta–and from there his memorable “March to the Sea.”
Grant, however, was summoned east to Washington, promoted to lieutenant general and given command of all Union armies.
Arriving in March 1864 at Washington’s Willard Hotel, where Lincoln stayed prior to his first inauguration, Grant went up to the desk in one of his typically travel-worn, nondescript uniforms, asking for a room. Told there was only the bleakest of accommodations on the attic level, he said that would be satisfactory. When the clerk saw who had signed the register, he quickly offered the finest the hotel had.
The Willard would figure later in Grant’s life. As president, he would sometimes wander over from the nearby White House and sit in the Willard lobby, smoking cigars and observing the scene. Favor-seekers who caught wind of this habit helped coin the modern-day term “lobbyist.” The original Willard was replaced shortly after the turn of the 19th Century with a larger Beaux Arts building that itself has been handsomely restored. The lobby is very reminiscent of what was there in Grant’s day, however.
Assuming overall command, Grant retained Gen. George Meade as operational commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, but–making his headquarters in the saddle–Grant traveled with it and ordered its movements.
Some hold that the July 1863 battle of Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War, a defeat from which the Confederacy never really recovered. But one could place the true turning point in the conflict nearly a year later at a tree-shaded crossroads of the Orange Plank and Brock Roads here in northern Virginia, just outside Fredericksburg.
In May 1864, Grant was pushing his army south from the Rappahannock River, passing through a thickly wooded area of brush and briar tangles called “the Wilderness.” Seeking to cut the new Union invasion short, Lee struck at Grant as his army was passing through this forbidding forest. A horrible, two-day battle ensued, with many wounded burning to death when the woods caught fire. The fight was a standoff but so costly to the North a Union withdrawal was expected.
On the rainy night after the close of battle, the weary soldiers of the battered Union Army were slogging along, believing they were once again going to retreat, as they had done time after time in Virginia since the first battle of Bull Run three years before.
Instead, at the crossroads, they encountered the muddy, unkempt figure of their new commanding general, who sat upon his horse, blocking the road to the north, directing the troops onto another that led south and east and eventually to Richmond.
Grant moved his army to Spotsylvania Court House, a key crossroads to the southeast. Lee hurried his army east, arriving just in time to block the Union advance. The battle here was costly in casualties and indecisive, but again Grant moved east and south, compelling Lee to do likewise.
Neither the Wilderness nor Spotsylvania Court House has its own National Park Service visitor center, but there are informative visitor shelters at each. Both are part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, and are serviced by the excellent visitor center at the Chancellorsville Battlefield, where directions to key battlefield sites, including the Brock crossroads and Bloody Angle, can be obtained.
The next big clash came a few miles northeast of Richmond at Cold Harbor, a town that drew its name from the colonial term for an inn that did not serve hot food. With the town initially seized by Union Gen. Phillip Sheridan’s cavalry, both sides threw their main forces into the fight, occupying what became well-fortified positions. Grant’s repeated assaults against the Confederate line cost him 15,500 casualties, compared to the enemy’s 2,500. It was his worst defeat, but again he did not retreat and instead moved south. But he changed his strategy, deciding to strangle Richmond with a siege line instead of attacking Lee with another frontal assault.
The Park Service’s Richmond National Battlefield Park includes Cold Harbor, along with battlefields from earlier campaigns. The visitor center occupies the Confederacy’s old Tredegar Iron Works.
Once he had Lee pinned down defending Richmond, Grant, with his superior numbers, began to extend his line south and west around Lee’s right flank, eventually reaching around the city of Petersburg, Va., as well. On July 30, 1864, he had a chance to win the war then and there when Union engineers, who had dug a tunnel under the Rebel entrenchments, blew up a large part of the Confederate line. Federal forces, most of them black troops, poured into the crater but were cut to pieces by a Confederate counterattack when they failed to get reinforcements.
This area of the line has been well preserved as part of Petersburg National Battlefield. Grant’s headquarters for this campaign is at City Point, now known as Hopewell, Va. President Lincoln visited him here.
Continuing to extend his lines, cutting railroads connecting Richmond to the rest of the South and putting pressure on Lee’s front, Grant finally compelled Lee to break and run, abandoning Petersburg and the capital on April 2, 1865. A week later, Lee surrendered to Grant at the McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Va., in the most famous such ceremony in American history.
“I remember now that I was concerned with my personal appearance,” Grant wrote later. “I had an old suit on, without my sword, and without any distinguishing mark of rank except the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general on a woolen blouse. I was splashed with mud in my long ride. I was afraid Lee might think I meant to show him studied discourtesy by so coming.”
Appomattox Court House National Historic Park now is a beautiful, serene and profoundly moving place.
Washington, where Grant was received with reverential acclaim and ultimately resided for two terms as president, has two obligatory sites to visit. One, ironically, is Ford’s Theatre. On the night of his assassination, Lincoln invited Grant and his wife to accompany him to the theater, but Grant declined, largely because Mrs. Grant could not stand the emotionally unbalanced and mercurial Mrs. Lincoln.
The other is the 252-foot-long Grant Memorial and reflecting pool at the foot of Capitol Hill on the east end of the National Mall. Its extraordinary sculptures by Henry Shrady include an equestrian statue of Grant that depicts him much as he might have looked at the crossroads on the rainy night after the Battle of the Wilderness.
Nearly destitute and in political disgrace because of corruption in his administration, Grant died of throat cancer in 1885 at his post-presidential home (now a New York state museum, the Grant Cottage) in Mt. McGregor, N.Y., just outside of Saratoga Springs. He had just finished his memoirs, famously published by Mark Twain and admired as one of the world’s finest examples of autobiography.
He is buried in New York City in Grant’s Tomb, part of the Gen. Grant National Memorial.
IF YOU GO
BEFORE/AFTER THE WAR
– Point Pleasant, Ohio–Grant’s Birthplace, just off U.S. Highway 52, about 5 miles east of New Richmond; 513-553-4911; www.ohiohistory.org/places/grantbir/. Hours: April through October, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
– West Point, N.Y.–U.S. Military Academy, just outside Highland Falls, off New York Highway 9W not far from the intersection of Interstate Highway 84 and the New York State Thruway (Interstate Highway 87); 845-938-2638; www.usma.edu/visiting.asp. Hours: The Visitors Center and museum are open daily, with the exception of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Visitors Center hours are 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Museum hours are 10:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.
– St. Louis–Grant Family Cabin, Grant’s Farm Theme Park, 10501 Gravols Road, St. Louis; 314-843-1700; www.grantsfarm.com. Hours: Vary by season.
– St. Louis–Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, 7400 Grant Rd., St. Louis; 314-842-3298; www.nps.gov/ulsg/index.htm. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
– Galena–U.S. Grant Home State Historic Site, 500 Bouthillier St.; 815-777-3310; www.granthome.com. Hours: 9 a.m.-4:45 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Presidents Day, General Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day.
– Washington, D.C.–Ford’s Theatre, 10th and E Streets; 202-426-6924; www.nps.gov/foth/index.htm. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed Christmas Day. The Grant Memorial and reflecting pool is at the foot of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Willard Hotel, 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. (202-628-9100), is not the original, but it has a Grant Suite and a lobby reminiscent of Grant’s time.
– Mt. McGregor, N.Y.–Grant Cottage, on County Road 101 near U.S. Highway 9; 518-587-8277; nysparks.state.ny.us/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/nysparks/historic.cgi +8. Hours: Season opens Memorial Day weekend. Call for hours.
– New York City–Gen. Grant National Memorial (Grant’s Tomb), West 122nd Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan; 212-666-1640; www.nps.gov/gegr/index.htm. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.
WESTERN CAMPAIGN
– Dover, Tenn.–Ft. Donelson National Battlefield, U.S. Highway 79 just outside town; 931-232-5706; www.nps.gov/fodo/index.htm. Hours: Visitor Center 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily; closed Christmas Day.
– Shiloh, Tenn.–Shiloh National Military Park, 1055 Pittsburg Landing Rd.; 731-689-5696; www.nps.gov/shil/index.htm. Hours: 8 a.m. to dusk daily; closed Christmas Day.
– Vicksburg, Miss.–Vicksburg National Military Park, 3201 Clay St.; 601-636-0583; www.nps.gov/vick/index.htm. Hours: Visitor Center 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed Christmas Day.
– Chattanooga, Tenn., area–The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park includes Chickamauga Visitor Center, Lafayette Road just off U.S. Highway 27, south of Ft. Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-866-9241; www.nps.gov/chch/index.htm. Hours: Visitor Center 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. until June 16, 8 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. until Labor Day. The park also includes Lookout Mountain Visitor Center, East Brow Road on top of Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga; 423-821-7786; same Web site. Hours: Same.
EASTERN CAMPAIGN
– Fredericksburg, Va.–Chancellorsville Battlefield, on Virginia Highway 3, about 12 miles west of town; 540-786-2880; www.nps.gov/frsp/cville.htm. Information and directions for the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, are available here. Hours: Visitor Center 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekends
– Richmond, Va.–Richmond National Battlefield Park, 490 Tredegar St., just off 5th Street, on the James River south of downtown; 804-226-1981; www.nps.gov/rich/index.htm. Hours: Sunrise to sunset daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day.
– Petersburg, Va.–Petersburg National Battlefield visitor center, on Virginia Highway 36, about 2 1/2 miles east of Interstate Highway 95; 804-732-3531; www.nps.gov/pete/index.htm. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day.
– Hopewell, Va.–Grant’s Headquarters, on Cedar Lane just off Appomattox Street; 804-458-9504; www.nps.gov/pete/index.htm. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day.
– Appomattox Court House, Va.–Appomattox Court House National Historic Park visitor center is on Virginia Highway 24, 2 miles northeast of town; 434-352-8987, ext. 26; www.nps.gov/apco/index.htm. Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day.
