Grant and Juneteenth

 The Friends of Grant Cottage blog has put up a post by me today on Ulysses S. Grant and Juneteenth which can be found here.

Tomorrow evening, I'll be in Syracuse to give a talk to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table. Details here.

Sojourner Truth's Grandson Served with Montgomery

 

In this 1863 photo of Sojourner Truth (in the Library of Congress), she holds in her lap a photograph of James Caldwell, her 19-year-old grandson who was a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts. Another soldier in that regiment was Lewis Douglass, son of another famous Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.

Caldwell was apparently captured at Grimball's Landing, SC, on July 16, 1863, just before the regiment was temporarily removed from Montgomery's brigade command. He was exchanged in early 1865, before the war ended. How the rest of his life went is unknown, according to blogger Tim Talbott.

I found out about Caldwell last week while visiting a new state park named after Truth near Kingston, NY, where I gave my first talk for the new biography of Montgomery to the Ulster County Civil War Round Table. It was their first in-person meeting since the onset of Covid, and held in the county's legislative chamber. The next gigs (during which I'll throw in some Granger and Juneteenth, and maybe a little Grant) are May 19 to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table in Syracuse, and May 23 in Manhattan to the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York.

I had never been to Kingston before, and had not realized a) that the British burned it in 1777 in a late, ineffectual effort to aid General John Burgoyne, and b) that George Washington's headquarters was not there but a considerable distance south, in Newburgh. Apparently, I have a lot to learn.

General Grant and Literary Imagination (revised)

The photo by Joe Alper shows Bob Dylan, his girlfriend Suze Rotolo and Lena Spencer in January 1962. I noticed it last night on a wall at Caffe Lena (founded by and named after Spencer) in Saratoga Springs, NY, where Dylan performed that month and the previous June.

I was at Caffe Lena for a staged reading of a new play, Grant's Ghost by Warren Schultz, whom I'd never met before. Our mutual friend Larry Levine was one of the actors. The play is about the death of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885 on Mount McGregor, a few miles north of Saratoga Springs. I liked it and said so, with particular praise for the "ghost" character, Grant's father Jesse -- though I inevitably had a few nits to pick.

Oddly, in the late 1990s I also started writing a play about more or less the same things, which almost 20 years later I turned into a novel, The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant. The rather more celebrated playwright John Guare wrote about the same general subject in 2002 in A Few Stout Individuals. His play is set in New York City before Grant's final days, while my novel takes place both there and on Mount McGregor. 

My other two Civil War era books are biographies, of James Montgomery and Gordon Granger, and I know some history buffs and students of warfare who are suspicious of historical fiction. But an imaginative sympathy is required for both kinds of writing.

Consider the great Russians (whom I am obviously not measuring myself against). Of course there is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, but I'm thinking of another novel which I'd barely heard of until my cousin Steve Pinto gave me a copy about a year ago: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It's the best book I've ever read about World War II, taking in the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet forced labor camps, and told through gripping, tragic, empathetic, fictional stories that resound with truth.

Six decades and a Nobel Prize on, Dylan remains a profoundly creative artist. And Grant, born 200 years ago today, who wrote one great book at the end of his life, is still an inspiration.

My first speaking gig for the new Montgomery book is 7 p.m. this Thursday (tomorrow) at the Ulster County Civil War Round Table in Kingston, NY.

Frederick Douglass on Free Speech in Wartime

Frederick Douglass gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City on February 6, 1863,  and published the text in March in his own abolitionist newspaper Douglass' Monthly.

It is, among other things, a magnificent defense of free speech in the middle of America's most costly war (to this day), when the Union cause in that war remained very precarious. It was written by a man who as an enslaved youth had taught himself to read in Maryland, before escaping North in 1838.

The speech was titled "The Proclamation and a Negro Army." Its context is the new light of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which coincided with increased Copperhead agitation against the president, the war and the anti-slavery movement. 

Douglass said:

"Parties have to some extent changed sides on the subject of free speech. The men who would a few years ago mob and hang Abolitionists for exercising the sacred right of free thought and speech, have all at once become the most urgent for the largest liberty of speech. And I must say, detestable as are the motives that have brought them to the defense of free speech, I think they have the right in the controversy. I do not know where I would limit the simple utterance of opinion. If any one is base enough to spit upon the grave of his mother, or to shout for Jefferson Davis, let him, and do not lock him up for it. ...

"Fortunately for mankind, error is a bad reasoner. It can fight better than it can reason. ... Such is my confidence in the potency of truth, in the power of reason, I hold that had the right of free discussion been preserved during the last thirty years, had the Northern parties and politicians been half so diligent in protecting this high constitutional right, from the first ruthlessly struck down all over the South, as they have been in framing laws for the recapture of poor, toil-worn and foot-sore slaves, we should now have no Slavery to breed Rebellion, nor war, black with dismal terror, to drench our land with blood, and fill our dwellings with sorrow and mourning. Slavery would have fallen as it fell in the West Indies, as it has fallen in the Free States, as it has fallen in Russia, and elsewhere, and as it will fall everywhere, when men can assail it with the weapons of reason and the facts of experience."

 

The Missing Stories from Civil War Era

The Tuskegee Airmen obviously didn't fight in the Civil War, but the U.S. armed forces were still segregated when Clarence Dart served in the 1940s. His extraordinary war record and subsequent life are described briefly above, in a display from a current exhibit at Brookside Museum in Ballston Spa, NY, called "Black Experiences in Saratoga County 1750-1950".

That life, as you can see, extended well after 1950, including a long and fruitful marriage, and service to causes such as the Charlton School for Girls, the Salvation Army and the Methodist Church.

Lieutenant Colonel Dart was duly (if belatedly) recognized by museums, media and elected officials from the state Senate to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 

But little is known about the vast majority of African-American troops in the Civil War who were led by officers such as James Montgomery, Gordon Granger and U.S. Grant. (That last link goes to a novel about Grant's last months, partly set in Saratoga County, which Brookside currently has for sale. Brookside is also sponsoring an April 6 Zoom program with Ben Kemp portraying Grant's eldest son Fred.) 

The new federal holiday of Juneteenth comes from Granger's order of June 19, 1865 in Texas, proclaiming Emancipation and, in his words, "an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves". Unlike Montgomery, Granger had not been an early abolitionist. President Grant, by the end of his second term, was not able to secure Reconstruction as a permanent guarantee of the equal rights which had been pledged. But the freed slaves, most of them illiterate, and their descendants held to an accurate understanding of this history. As a result, spurred by nonviolent Black leadership of the mid-20th century civil rights movement, the promise of Juneteenth was largely fulfilled.

Seward, Tubman and Montgomery

 

These splendid statues by Dexter Benedict are still looking good, almost three years after their installation outside the main branch of the Schenectady public library in 2019. The wife (who took the photo) and I were in town yesterday to go to the opening night of Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along" at the Schenectady Light Opera Company (running through March 27 -- check it out).

William H. Seward is best known for the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, but his long, admirable  record as a statesman is most distinguished by his service in Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, and in later life was a friend and ally of Tubman's. Other statues of them both, separate but not far from each other, now stand in Auburn, NY.

Another friend and ally of Tubman's was Col. James Montgomery, whose African-American 2nd South Carolina Regiment was guided and assisted by Tubman and other Black civilians on the Combahee River raid, which liberated almost 800 slaves. The Civil War service of both Tubman and Montgomery is, in my opinion, often overlooked by historians and students who focus on their prewar anti-slavery activities. But they freed far more enslaved people on June 1-2 1863 than in all the rest of their careers, and their contributions to the Union war effort are the most significant things they did.

Casemate will publish in April 2022 my biography of Montgomery. See more at their website here.

Casemate is also reissuing as a paperback my 2013 biography, General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". (See here on their website.) 

And my 2018 historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is still available here from Square Circle Press.

New book, new start for this blog

Casemate will publish in April 2022 my biography of James Montgomery, the Kansas abolitionist and Civil War soldier. See more at their website here.

Casemate is also reissuing as a paperback my 2013 biography, General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". (See here on their website.) 

And my 2018 historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is still available here from Square Circle Press.

So after a two-year gap I will be restarting this blog, and setting up talks in person and/or online to promote the new book and the old ones. See you around, I hope.