The Fairfax House, Rock Hill

This Spring, Missouri is celebrating its favorite military son, Ulysses Grant.  As the sesquicentennial of the Civil War begins, let us use the term “celebrate” carefully.  We commemorate the men and women who fought honorably and suffered horribly during our nation’s most defining conflict.  But, there is time to celebrate one unassuming man, who during our Civil War rose from personal failure to worldwide acclaim.

On April 13, 2011, the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis is hosting a visit by Ulysses Grant.  Grant in this case arrives in the guise of Scott Whitney of Winnebago, Illinois.  Scott is a history teacher in his home town, which is a few miles west of Rockford.  His passion: portraying the life of Ulysses Grant.  Scott portrayal at the Missouri Athletic Club event will focus on Grant’s many ties to the St. Louis area.   Attendees will receive a complementary copy of Friend and Foe Alike: A Tour Guide to Missouri’s Civil War, and I will be signing copies of the book.  Click on “Book Events” for full details.

Grant’s strengths and his faults have been debated for well over a century.  I can relate two little known incidents that illustrate what was, simultaneously, his most disarming and undoing personal trait.  Grant was fiercely loyal to people who befriended him.

Grant spent some his most challenging years in St. Louis, 1854-1860, moving about in the Southern society of his wife’s family, centered in Southwest St. Louis County.  This was then a very rural world; he counted as his “neighbors” people who lived many miles from his Hardscrabble Farm.

Case 1:  Dr. James A. Barrett

Dr. Barrett (some times spelled Barret) was a member of a prominent Virginia/Kentucky clan that emigrated to St. Louis before the Civil War.  In 1864, he along with a cousin (pre-War U. S. Congressman John Richard Barrett) became embroiled in a national controversy.   An investigation got underway into the activities of a clandestine group of Southern supporters known as the Sons of Liberty.  James Barrett was targeted as a member of the “Northwest Conspiracy,” alleged to be a massive operation to aid the Confederate war effort and overthrow the government of the United States.  The investigation, centered on the Son of Liberty’s activities in Missouri and Indiana, snared Indiana copperhead congressman Clement L. Vallandigham and others.  Later in the year, one Lambdin P. Milligan and four others were tried by a military tribunal in Indianapolis – the trial timed to precede the national elections in November, 1864. Milligan was sentenced to hang.  He was freed when the U. S. Supreme Court in 1866 issued a landmark Opinion, Ex Parte Milligan, which held that military courts had no jurisdiction to try civilians where civil courts were operating.

Dr. James Barrett of St. Louis was an unindicted conspirator in the trial of Lambdin Milligan. His activities were prominently noted in the testimony of witnesses.  But Barrett was not brought to trial.

On June 25, 1864, Ulysses Grant sent a telegram from headquarters in City Point, Virginia, to the Secretary of War.

“I will feel obliged to you if you will order General Rosecrans to release Dr. J. A. Barrett [on bail],. . . or to give him an immediate trial. The doctor is a copperhead, but I have no idea that he has done anything more than that class of people are constantly doing, and not so much.  He was a neighbor of mine, a clever man, and has a practice in the neighborhood which it will be very inconvenient to other people than himself to have interrupted.”

Grant arrived in City Point ten days before he paused to write his telegram to Secretary Stanton.  He had just completed another of his master strokes, outflanking Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia after Cold Harbor and landing in Lee’s rear at Petersburg.  Grant had on his mind the plight of a country doctor who once supported him in his bid to become County Engineer in St. Louis.

Stanton relented. Rosecrans fumed.  The matter reached the desk of Abraham Lincoln, who wrote to Rosecrans: “When did the Sec. of War telegraph you to release Dr.

Barrett? If it is an old thing, let it stand till you hear further.”

Case 2:  General John McCausland

“Tiger John” McCausland graduated first in the VMI class of 1857.  When the Civil War began, McCausland organized Virginia’s Rockbridge Artillery, then served in successively more important command positions in the Confederate army.  He famously escaped from Ft. Donelson in 1862, before Grant captured the place and most of the army that defended it.  As a Brigadier General of cavalry in 1865, he even escaped Grant at Appomattox.

McCausland’s military reputation, otherwise distinguished, was stained by the burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in July, 1864.  Under orders of his superiors, McCausland entered the town and demanded payment of reparations for Union depradations in the Shenandoah Valley.  When his demand was refused, he burned the town.  At the close of the War, McCausland was indicted by a Pennsylvania grand jury for arson; He lived in Mexico and in Europe for a time, finally returning to the United States in 1867 after Ulysses Grant intervened to quash the Pennsylvania indictment.

Tiger John McCausland was born in St. Louis in 1836, son of a John McCausland who gave the name to McCausland Avenue.  The elder McCausland owned large tracts of land in downtown St. Louis, and devised St. Louis’ first system of taxation.  He died the same year his wife died, 1843, leaving John and his brother orphans.  In 1847, John moved to what is now West Virginia to be raised by an uncle.  He had lived with his paternal grandmother in St. Louis County before leaving for the east, but no doubt often visited his aunt Elizabeth Marshall at her home “Fairfax,” restored and standing in Rock Hill on Manchester Road.

The National Register application for McCausland’s post-war home near Henderson, West Virginia states that Ulysses Grant was “an old family friend of the McCauslands.”  Enough said.

Presentation and Book Signing

Where:  Kansas City Public Libary – Plaza Branch.  4801 Main Street in Kansas City

When: April 20, 2011 6:30 p.m.

Books are available for purchase during the event.  Author will also sign books purchased at any location before the event.

In 1901, a man by the name of Winston Churchill released his third novel. This man was not the future prime minister of Great Britain.  This Winston Churchill was born in St. Louis in 1871.  His third novel, entitled The Crisis, sold out its first print run (100,000 volumes) in a matter of six days.  It would prove to be America’s best-selling work of fiction that year, and Winston Churchill’s best seller of all time.  Our Churchill is credited the most popular American novelist of the first quarter of the twentieth century.  His novels were in the top 10 list for fiction in each of the years 1900, 1901, 1904, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1914 and 1915, and were the best-sellers in four of those years.  He corresponded with, and purportedly once met, the British Winston Churchill, whose own literary career was budding in 1900.  Out of deference to the more popular American writer, the British Churchill thereafter signed his works “Winston S. Churchill.”

Our Winston Churchill left St. Louis to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1894.  Instead of going to sea, Churchill became an editor of the Army and Navy Journal. He soon resigned his commission, taking a job with Cosmopolitan Magazine in New York. He met and married a wealthy St. Louis girl, whose fortune permitted Churchill to turn his full attention to writing.  With the proceeds of his second novel, 1899’s Richard Carvel, he built a magnificent home in the artist colony of Cornish, New Hampshire. Among his neighbors there were sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and illustrator Maxfield Parrish.  Churchill’s Cornish estate was rented by President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson to serve as the summer White House in 1913-1915.

So the world has forgotten this very famous man.  The world, including St. Louis, has also largely forgotten the subject of his most popular work.  The incident at the heart of The Crisis, which was drawn accurately from the historical record and from the reminiscences of Churchill’s St. Louis friends, was the Camp Jackson Affair, also known as the Camp Jackson Massacre.  This is what touched off the Civil War in Missouri.  The date was May 10, 1861, less than a month after Fort Sumter.  In St. Louis that day, units of armed infantry confronted each other was the first time in the American Civil War.

As clouds of war gathered across the nation, the Missouri State Militia established camp in St. Louis for their spring maneuvers, in a field two miles west of downtown.  The militiamen were primarily sons of Southern pioneer families. Politically they reflected the predominant agrarian and Southern sympathies of the Missouri government of the time.  St. Louis on the other hand was a stew-pot of foreign cultures.  In 1861, St. Louis had more people of foreign birth in its population, proportionately, than any other city in the United States.  Many of these people immigrated a decade earlier, after pro-democratic uprisings consumed much of western Europe in 1848-1849.  Particularly in St. Louis, prominent German-Americans who left Europe (and Hungarians and Czechs and Poles) tended to the radical left.  It was the left that lost the struggle in Europe.

Motives are still debated.  The state government’s decision to assemble the militia in St. Louis was doubtlessly intended as a provocation.  Most historians agree that the state militia was receiving arms captured from a federal arsenal in the South.  St. Louis was the site of the largest arsenal in the western United States.  At first, it was protected by a tiny force of regular Army troops.  In the weeks leading up to May 10, with the active support of the Lincoln Administration, German-Americans mobilized in social and athletic clubs that dotted the city (their turnvereins).  These troops were accepted into federal service by a process that skirted legality.  Thee were commanded by a Connecticut regular army captain named Nathaniel Lyon.

Now swelled to 6,000 to 7,000 in all, Lyon’s regulars and specially enrolled German regiments surrounded the militia at Camp Jackson.  The militia quickly surrendered.  A crowd of onlookers gathered all morning. Then, with the captives lined up to be marched to the Arsenal, one of the German regiments fired into the crowd.  Several men of the militia and several of the federal troops died or were wounded.  Nearly a hundred civilian casualties ensued, many of them women and children.  Twenty eight people died.  No one to this day knows why Lyon’s men fired.

____

In 1901, a New York critic went out in the streets of Manhattan to gauge the public’s reaction to The Crisis.  He reported that every person he approached had read the book, or had bought it to read.  The critic, not enamored with the book, thought that it was the “psychology of the mob” that fueled the book’s popularity.  In 1901, St. Louis was the center of New York’s attention, as it was the epicenter, forty years before, of the nation’s greatest crisis.