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.

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.

Mokane City Cemetery

Many Missourians who follow the Civil War know the book Pilot Knob: The Thermopylae of the West.  The 1914 work describes the 1864 Battle of Pilot Knob and its aftermath.  The most remarkable feature of this episode was the cross-country retreat of the Union garrison to the safety of the railroad at Leasburg, Missouri.  The Union General commanding the garrison, Thomas Ewing, claimed to have covered 66 miles in 39 hours.  The authors of Thermopylae of the West accept his estimate; a survey of the garrison’s likely route confirms that the distance traveled by Ewing’s column was not less than 60 miles. The amount of time consumed by the march is accurate, judging by the reports and correspondence in the Official Records.  The arithmetic cannot be challenged. These men averaged 37 to 40 miles per day.

Peterson and Hanson, the authors of Thermopylae of the West, make a striking claim that Ewing’s retreat lies in the top rank of history’s great forced marches of infantry.  The claim is incredulous, particularly when one considers that Ewing brought with him a couple dozen civilians who had fought with him at Pilot Knob.  In his report, Ewing claims that refugee women and children accompanied him on the march as well.

There are many things that Peterson and Hanson exaggerate in their account of the battle and retreat.  No less an authority than General Henry Halleck, “Old Brains” of the old army, provides some independent verification of the extraordinary nature of Ewing’s retreat.  In his 1846 classic Elements of Military Art and Science, Halleck includes his own short list of great forced marches.  “In 1803 Wellington’s cavalry in India marched the distance of sixty miles in thirty-two hours.”  That’s cavalry, mind you.  Halleck comments that infantry can be counted on to march 30 miles a day in spurts of two or three days, but only with the advantage of favorable roads.

Ewing had cavalry with him: six companies of the Third Missouri State Militia Cavalry.  This hardly accounts for the rapidity of the march of the companies of the 14^th Iowa Infantry and the 47^th and 50^th Missouri regiments of infantry.  It is true that Ewing’s retreat was an astonishing feat.

The Third Missouri State Militia Cavalry figures into the subject of this piece.  Peterson and Hanson give us a reference to a young cavalryman of the Third who stopped to marry his girl during the retreat.  According to one of Peterson’s post-war interviews, the man was Aleck Adams and the young lady made the harrowing trip to Leasburg with the army.  It is time we gave her a name.

Mary Elizabeth Gibson was born in Virginia in 1835.  She was raised in southeast Callaway County. At age twenty, in Portland, Missouri, she married a man named Jacob Detwiler.  Little is known of Jacob, except that in her Civil War widow’s pension application Mary recounts that he was an itinerant shoemaker.  Mary divorced him, and was left to raise a young daughter on her own.  Late 1863 found Mary working in a Hermann, Missouri hotel or tavern.  William Alexander Adams, nine years her junior, was in Hermann recuperating from a battle wound.  The next year, on September 14, 1864, Aleck and Mary wed.  She went to live with Aleck’s father at his home in northern Iron County, very near the road that connects Ironton to Caledonia.  Not two weeks later, Ewing used this road (modern State Highway 21) to escape the clutches of Price’s army.  Mary was in the right place and at the right time.  Adams’ family tradition, passed on by great grandson Ken Lilly, confirms that Mary was on the retreat to Leasburg.  As reported in Thermopylae of the West, she rode Aleck’s horse a good deal of the way, he leading his bride on foot.

After the war, Mary and Aleck moved to Mokane, Missouri, in Callaway County.  They had six children of their own.  Aleck passed away in 1905.  Mary survived until 1920, when she died in Mokane at the age of 85.  Aleck has a veteran’s stone in the Mokane Cemetery.  Mary’s resting place is not marked.

If General Ewing’s report can be believed, Mary Elizabeth Gibson Adams was not the only woman who took part in one of the great forced marches of our Civil War.  At least her story can be preserved for posterity, for which special thanks is due Bruce Ketchem, former administrator of the Deutschheim State Historic Site in Hermann.

Now, if the Duke of Wellington had some Missouri women with him in India . . .

Mystery Man

In the 1950s, Groucho Marx would lob this question to You Bet Your Life contestants who were on the ropes:  Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?

Ulysses S. Grant is the only President buried in Manhattan.  His mausoleum on Riverside Drive was completed in 1897. Its exterior is modeled after artists’ conceptions of the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, a wonder of ancient Greece that gave us the word for such monuments.  The magnificent interior space is a nod in the direction Napoleon’s tomb in Paris.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Grant’s Tomb was New York’s most popular attraction, outpacing even the Statue of Liberty.  Over the decades that followed, the site fell gradually but steadily into disrepair. The National Park Service accepted responsibility for the eyesore in 1957, but for years thereafter it suffered the usual neglect. The centennial of the Tomb’s dedication finally provided the impetus for improving it, and this magnificent edifice was re-dedicated in 1997.  It has been returned to its former glory.  Grant’s Tomb promises to be the premier venue for New York residents and visitors who might pause during the sesquicentennial years, to look past the hustle and bustle of the great city for a glimpse of the Civil War.  It is one of few, but by no means only, reminders of the Civil War still present in Manhattan.

In 1903, New York dedicated a monument in Grand Army Plaza, Fifth Avenue and 60^th Street.  The world knows the place as “the Plaza.”   It is an equestrian statue of a triumphant William Tecumseh Sherman, executed by a man born in Ireland with the improbable name (for an Irishman) of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  This was the last work of the most famous American sculptor of his day.  In all of its gold-gilt glory, it is easy to imagine it gracing a boulevard in Paris.  What is difficult to imagine is that this statue is one of only twelve out-of-doors equestrian statues that exist in all of Manhattan.

Here is a question that Groucho Marx never asked:

Out of the twelve equestrian statutes in Manhattan, six depict men or women who were not Americans;

Two do not depict human beings;

Two of the remaining four were U. S. Presidents;

The last two portray military men who witnessed the Camp Jackson Affair in St. Louis on May 10, 1861;

There is no equestrian statue of Ulysses Grant in Manhattan.

One of the two is William Tecumseh Sherman.  With war coming on, Sherman resigned as commandant of a Louisiana military school – the predecessor of Louisiana State University.  Sherman took a position as president of a streetcar company and as a result he was in St. Louis on May 10, 1861.

Camp Jackson was the second major incident of America’s Civil War.  Union troops in St. Louis took members of the Missouri State Militia into custody.  A Union regiment fired into the ranks of the militia, and into a crowd of onlookers that had gathered at the scene. Nearly a hundred civilian casualties ensued, many of them women and children.  Twenty eight people died.

Sherman died in New York City in 1891, but he is buried in St. Louis.

The second military man whose bronzed image graces the streets of Manhattan is Union General Franz Sigel. His equestrian statue stands near Grant’s Tomb, overlooking Riverside Park at the west end of 106^th Street.  Sigel emigrated to New York from Germany in 1852, and taught for a time in the New York Public Schools.  He continued his teaching career when he moved to St. Louis in 1857.  Just before the Civil War, Sigel became Superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools.  Sigel was at Camp Jackson as colonel of the Third Missouri Infantry Volunteers.  A company of his regiment is the one that fired into the crowd.  Sigel died in New York and is buried in a Yonkers cemetery.

Ulysses Grant, too, witnessed the Camp Jackson incident.  He had deep ties to the St. Louis area before the Civil War, but by May 10, 1861 he had moved his family to Illinois.  He came to St. Louis on the fateful day because he was on a recruiting mission for Illinois’ Governor.

Grant is buried in Grant’s Tomb.

Mystery Man

The notorious Sam Hildebrand of St. Francois County, Missouri, was wounded quite severely in 1869.  As a result, he hid out in the town of Big River Mills, where he dictated a memoir of his Civil War escapades.  The memoir, referred to as his Autobiography but also known as his “Confessions”, is on book shelves again thanks to author Kirby Ross.

The man who shot Hildebrand lived in Fredericktown, Missouri, as a young man, but he moved on to St. Louis to became an author and an officer of the Missouri Historical Society.  The man died in 1915 in Webster Groves.

Readers?

The 37th Illinois Volunteer Infantry took part in Fremont’s 1861 campaign, as well as the Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove campaigns.   John Charles Black of Danville, Illinois, would ultimately be the 37th’s colonel.  His younger brother, Captain William Black (right), won the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions at Pea Ridge.  John Charles received the MOH for gallantry at Prairie Grove.  They were the first of five sets of brothers in American history to receive the nation’s highest military honor.

Lear is a name that is known to Marion County, Missouri.  It is a name known to much of the world, in fact, because a man born in Hannibal in 1902 gave us first the car radio, the 8-track, and then the Lear Jet.  He held over 150 U.S. Patents.  His name was William Powell Lear.  He died in Las Vegas in 1978.

Is it possible that the inventor of the Lear Jet is related to our Francis Marion Lear?  Francis’ name appears on the monument in Palmyra.  He was captured during Porter’s Raid in Missouri in 1862, and he was one of the 10 men put to death at the Marion County Fairgrounds.

If anyone knows the burial place of Francis Lear, please let me know.  Is Francis Lear related to William P?  I’ll let you know.

Drive west from Palmyra for 13 miles, to the town of Philadelphia, which is on State Highway 168.  At Philadelphia take a turn north on State Route D, which you will follow for about 12 miles.  There is a bend in the road here where you will find the graveyard of an old Baptist Church, call Mt. Pleasant.  This is one of the most interesting gravestones in Missouri, and it is interesting on a number of levels.

There is an epitaph on this stone that reads:  “This monument is dedicated to the memory of Hiram Smith. The hero that sleeps beneath the sod here who was shot at Palmyra Oct. 17, 1862 as a substitute for Wm. T. Humphrey my father.”

William T. Humphrey was a young man with a large family who was selected for execution by the authorities in Palmyra, and then was spared at the last minute for reasons that are unclear but that still stir controversy.  We say the reasons are unclear, but Humphrey’s wife testified to a court martial in 1864 that the Union provost marshal in Palmyra demanded and received sexual favors in exchange for Humphrey’s release.  This could be a fertile basis for discussion, if we keep the discussion civil.

The son who erected the stone for Hiram Smith was George W. Humphrey, who became a Missouri State Senator.  Cynics might suggest that the stone was a political ad, but we don’t know when it was erected.  Probably before Humphrey’s political career began and probably for purely sentimental reasons.  George was not born when Hiram Smith was killed.

The date on the stone is wrong.

A July sun, in torrid clime, gleamed on exile band, who in suits of gray
Stood in mute array On the banks of the Rio Grande.
They were dusty and faint with their long, drear ride, And they paused when they
came to the river side;
For its wavelets divide
With their glowing tide

Their own dear land of youth, hope, pride And comrades graves, who in vain had
died, From the stranger’s home, in a land untried.
Above them waved the Confederate Flag, with its fatal cross of stars, That had
always been
In the battle’s din
Like a pennon of potent Mars.
And there curved from the crest of their leader a plume
That the brave had followed in joy and gloom That was ever in sight
In the hottest fight

A flaunting dare for a soldier’s tomb, For the marksman’s aim and the cannons
boom, But it bore a charm from the band of doom.

Forth stepped that leader then and said to the faithful few around:
“This tattered rag
Is the only flag
That floats on Dixie ground;
And this plume that I tear from the hat I wear
Of all my spoils is my only share; And brave men! I swear
That no foe shall dare
To lay his hand on our standard there. It’s folds were braided by fingers fair, “Tis
the emblem now of their deep despair.

It’s cause is lost. And the men it led on many a glorious field In disputing tread
Of invaders dread, Have been forced at last to yield
But this banner and plume have not been to blame, No exulting eye shall behold
their shame;
And—–these relics so dear
In the waters here,
Before we cross, shall burial claim;
And while you mountains may bear name
They shall stand as monuments of our fame.

Tears stood in eyes that looked on death in every awful form Without dismay;
But the scene that day Was sublimer than mountain storm!
“Tis easy to touch the veteran’s heart
With finger of nature, but not of art, While the noble of soul
Lose self control, When called on with flag, home and country to part, Base bosoms are ever to callous to start
With feelings that generous natures can smart.They buried then that flag and plume in the river’s rushing tide, Ere that fallent few
Of the tried and true Had been scattered far and wide.
And that group of Missouri’s valiant throng, Who had fought for the weak against the strong-Who had charged and bled where Shelby led- Were the last who held above the wave
The glorious flag of the vanquished brave, No more to rise from it’s watery grave!

-Col. Alonzo Slayback, Missouri Confederate Brigade