Newly appointed Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant did not yet possess the uniform on this date in 1861, his 13th wedding anniversary. Stationed in Jefferson City, Missouri, he was soon summoned, still lacking the proper uniform, to St. Louis by Major General John Fremont, who appointed him to the crucial command post of Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois, just north of where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi.
August 22 was an eventful day on the Ohio at Paducah, Kentucky, where the Union Navy seized a boat used by the Confederates, but the rebels retaliated by seizing a larger Yankee one, and taking it south up the Tennessee River.
In early September, after the Confederates violated Kentucky's purported neutrality by moving north to occupy Columbus, Grant moved rapidly east, on his own authority, to seize Paducah. The Ohio River was now under Union control, and Abraham Lincoln registered his approval.
In November, Grant's army would move down the Mississippi to fight a battle at Belmont, Missouri, across from Columbus. Early the next year, it moved again by boat, this time southeast up the Ohio, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers with the Navy to attack Confederate forts Henry and Donelson. Their capture (along with the rebel army after a battle at Donelson) forced the Confederates to withdraw from Columbus and many other places they would not recover, including Clarksville and Nashville, Tennessee.
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