The Whirligig of Time

It is well known that Ulysses S. Grant was in 1861 a clerk in a leather goods store owned by his father, approaching 39 years old,  and among the more obscure residents of the United States. Also well known is his rapid promotion upon rejoining the Army, and the quick promotion of others from similar obscurity because of the urgent need for officers.
One of the latter was Francis Herron, a former bank clerk, who on this date in 1861 was a 24-year-old captain in the First Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which was training and organizing in the southeastern corner of that state on the Mississippi River. On June 13 the regiment embarked by steamship, railroad and march to central Missouri.
Less than two years later, after the battles of Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove, a haunted-looking Herron had become the youngest major general on either side of the Civil War, a role later to be taken by George Armstrong Custer. Unlike Custer in both regards, Herron seems to have lost some of his appetite for warfare, while retaining an idealistic commitment to the rights of African-Americans.
A carpetbagger in Louisiana after the war, he was a US marshal and state secretary of state. Marrying a widow there and raising her children, they all left with the end of the Grant administration and collapse of Reconstruction in 1877.
 Herron hacked out a modest career in law and business in New York City. Having adopted his wife's Catholic faith, he is buried with her in Calvary Cemetery, Queens. Grant's grand tomb in uptown Manhattan overlooks the Hudson River, not far from Herron's humble apartment. Herron, as you can see above, was listed on one side of the McCarthy grave marker, which was the family his stepdaughter Augusta married into.
Frank Herron served at the siege of Vicksburg in 1863 and was living in Manhattan in 1885, so it made sense to put him in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant.