Grant Rising: Mapping the Career of a Great Commander Through 1862

By Hal Jespersen, James R. Knight and Dana Lombardy

Grant Rising is an inspired, one-volume summary in maps and text of Ulysses S. Grant's famous battles in 1862 - including Donelson and Shiloh - and also his early life, including his frontier and Mexican War service - as well as his minor engagement in the Western Theater of the American Civil War.

Grant Rising features techniques that portray Civil War battles in a new way, such as shaded relief topography, giving the maps a three-dimensional appearance. Plus the use of different color tints to represent command relationships makes it easier to determine which brigades reported to which divisions and corps at a glance. Using slightly different shades of blue and red also allow for easy differentiation of many units on a single map, making the action easier to understand.

Grant Rising is a truly new type of map reference book as well as a remarkable history of Grant's early life and career through 1862.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lombardy Studios
• Release date: Nov 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940169125

Hal Jespersen

Since 2004, Hal has visited most of the major battlefields and contributed to Wikipedia as the principal author of about 250 Civil War articles and more than 200 battle and campaign maps, all of which are available for download at www.CWMaps.com. Hal developed a new style of maps for Grant Rising, including shaded relief typography and color tints to distinguish regiments, brigades, etc., and their command relationships. In addition to his free Wikipedia maps, Hal has produced more than 800 maps for publication in books and magazines.

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INTRODUCTION BY JAMES KNIGHT

...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

The American Civil War is the watershed event in the history of the United States. It remains the Western Hemisphere’s largest conflict, and produced, on its own soil, more misery, bloodshed, and destruction than America has suffered in all its foreign wars combined. The Civil War also, for better or worse, resolved political conflicts that dated back to the Founding Fathers and the Revolution. Arguments over of the institution of slavery and the proper relationship of the states to the federal government, ongoing for over 80 years, were finally settled by force of arms.

Through most of its short history, America maintained a small group of military professionals who commanded a relatively tiny national army and navy, depending on volunteer civilian militia to augment the professional forces in time of war. The Civil War, however, required volunteers on a scale never before seen. In January 1861, the entire United States army numbered about 16,000 men. Twelve months later, northern and southern armies fielding more than 800,000 men fought along a 1,000-mile front from the Atlantic Ocean to Missouri. And this was only the beginning.

During the four years of the war, almost three million men would serve in blue or gray, and the vast majority would live or die in obscurity. Some, however, would become famous, and influenced the course of the country for the rest of the 19th century. Foremost among that select group would be a middle-aged store clerk from Galena, Illinois, named Ulysses S. Grant.

Born in Ohio, Grant graduated from West Point in 1843 and served with distinction in the Mexican-American War. A promising military career was cut short, however, when he resigned while stationed in Oregon Territory in 1854 and spent the next seven years trying to provide for his wife and children in the civilian world, without much success. On the eve of the Civil War, Grant was approaching his 39th birthday and working as a clerk in his father’s leather goods business. He was about as unlikely a prospect to become the United States’ greatest war hero as you could find.

When the war began, men with military experience were called on to organize and train the flood of civilian volunteers that came forward. Grant, a former quartermaster, was at first relegated to mustering in new units and dealing with army paperwork while other men, with no military talents but good political connections, were given command of the regiments he organized. It would be three months before Grant’s persistence, along with the help of a powerful congressman, finally got him the regimental command he felt he deserved.

U.S. Grant as a brevet second lieutenant in 1843 (engraving from Grant’s Memoirs).

By all accounts, Ulysses S. Grant did not look like a remarkable man. At 5’8" with a short scruffy beard and slightly stooped, he could have been lost in a crowd. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln said this about the man he had just entrusted with command of almost 900,000 men:

He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew.¹

Given the destruction and carnage that accompanies it, the profession of arms is, in some ways, the most hideous career one can imagine. Most men endured the war as best they could, but there were a few who, amid that terrible conflict, found their true calling. Although he would live another twenty years after the war, travel the world, and serve two terms as president, it would always be the 48 months when he commanded men in battle that would define Ulysses S. Grant’s life.

As with all heroes, Grant had his share of lucky breaks and crucial help from friends in high places, but much of his luck he made for himself. He did not command by committee, preferring to trust his own instincts and then not agonize over decisions once they were made. On the battlefield, Grant never showed fear or panic, and he absolutely refused to quit. Historian Shelby Foote said of Grant:

He had what they call four o’clock in the morning courage. You could wake him up at four o’clock in the morning and tell him they had just turned his right flank and he would be as cool as a cucumber.²

This then is the story of the rise of Ulysses S. Grant, from leather store clerk to Major General and national hero in less than two years. His path from regional commander to architect of national victory is yet to come.

– James R. Knight, Author

1William O. Stoddard, Lincoln’s Third Secretary: The Memoirs of William O. Stoddard (Whitefish, Montana: Literary Licensing, 2011), 197.

2Quoted at http://www.granthomepage.com/grantgeneral.htm

GRANT’S EARLY LIFE

I WON’T GO

Hiram Ulysses Grant, on learning that his father had obtained for him an appointment to West Point

The man who became the United States Army’s most famous soldier of the 19th century was born at Point Pleasant, Ohio, just up the river from Cincinnati, on April 27, 1822. The firstborn son of Jesse Root Grant and Hanna Simpson, he was named Hiram Ulysses. The following year, the family moved to Georgetown, about eighteen miles to the east in neighboring Brown County. The son of a successful businessman, Grant would grow up in relatively comfortable and secure circumstances and later describe his childhood as uneventful.

Jesse Grant ran a tannery and owned a farm with some timberland, and expected his children to help out. Young Ulysses hated the tannery but loved anything having to do with horses, and so spent much of his time on the farm, which was fine with his father. Even as a young boy, Ulysses often drove a team and hauled all the wood for the business in town as well as for their home. He had a way with animals and soon developed a reputation as a skilled rider and a shrewd judge of fine horseflesh.

Early in 1839, Jesse Grant, through some political connections, managed to secure for his seventeen-year-old son an appointment to the United States Military Academy. Having no ambitions to become a soldier, Ulysses at first refused to go, but soon relented to his father’s wishes. It was, after all, a chance to travel and see the wider world beyond the Ohio River. Young Grant decided that, should he survive the four-year course of study, he could always resign from the Army after a short time and put his education to better use as a civilian.

Later that summer, when he reported with the incoming class at West Point, the new cadet found out that, because of a clerical error at the Ohio congressman’s office, the Army knew him, not as Hiram Ulysses but as Ulysses S. Grant. Unable to convince the military bureaucracy otherwise, he became Ulysses S. Grant for the rest of his life.

Physically unimposing—his friend and upperclassman James Longstreet called him delicate—Grant was easily lost in the crowd at West Point, as he would be throughout his life. Quiet, soft-spoken, and somewhat shy, Grant had a quick and intelligent mind and without too much effort remained solidly in the middle of his class academically. Too small to excel in most athletics, it was only in the equestrian arena that glimpses of Grant the future Supreme Commander could be seen. On horseback he was in control and absolutely fearless, setting a high jump record in his final year on a horse few others would even attempt to ride.

In spite of some early misgivings, Grant survived favorably at the Academy and graduated 21st out of 39 in the Class of 1843. During his time at West Point, he had filled out, grown six inches, and became acknowledged as the finest horseman on the post. In 1843, the Army’s regiment of mounted troops was the Dragoons. Grant had listed them as his first choice for assignment, but was sent instead to his second choice, the 4th Infantry Regiment, stationed at Jefferson Barracks in Saint Louis.

Birthplace of Hiram Ulysses Grant—whose name due to a clerical error would forever be known as Ulysses S. Grant—at Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio. Galena and U.S. Grant Museum in Galena, Illinois

Also assigned to Jefferson Barracks was Grant’s friend and West Point roommate, Frederick T. Dent, whose home was only a few miles away. Grant soon became a frequent visitor at White Haven, the Dent family home, and by the following spring he was courting Fred’s eighteen-year-old sister. In May 1844, the 4th Infantry was ordered south to the Texas border, but by then 2nd Lieutenant U. S. Grant and Miss Julia Dent were unofficially engaged. Grant would spend the next fourteen months at Camp Salubrity near Natchitoches, Louisiana, writing long and earnest letters to Julia and waiting for further orders. Finally, in September 1845 Grant and the 4th Infantry was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas, as part of Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation. It would be three more years before he and Julia could marry.

Much of the information on Ulysses S. Grant’s life comes from his own memoirs, originally published by Mark Twain in 1885. Used throughout this work is the following edition:

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: The Library of America, 1990).

WAR WITH MEXICO

1846–1848

... a republic following the bad example of European monarchies.

U. S. Grant on American involvement in the Mexican War

As 1846 began, America was about to embark on its third major war, and, at least in Ulysses S. Grant’s opinion, its least justified one. At the end of his life, Ulysses S. Grant would write in his memoirs that he had always considered the war with Mexico one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. ¹

Whatever the diplomatic language might say, this war with Mexico was about the acquisition of land. Mexico controlled or claimed a huge slice of North America stretching from the United States border established with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 westward to the Pacific Ocean, including all or part of the present states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah as well as Texas, which Mexico refused to recognize as an independent nation. President James K. Polk, a proponent of westward expansion, sometimes called Manifest Destiny, intended to acquire this territory for the nation by purchase and annexation if possible—by conquest if necessary.

Early in 1845, while Grant was sitting in Camp Salubrity, writing to his sweetheart back in Missouri, Congress passed a bill authorizing the annexation of Texas, subject to a vote of the non-Mexican white males living in Texas that summer. Since it still claimed Texas as its territory, Mexico replied that annexation would mean war. Many in the northern states also opposed annexation because they saw it as a move by Southern interests to extend the institution of slavery into the new western lands. To President Polk, a Tennessean and a slave owner, this was not a problem.

In October of that year, a majority of Texians voted for annexation along with a new state constitution that endorsed slavery. As part of the annexation, the United States also agreed to assume Texas’s outstanding debts of about $10 million. On December 29, 1845, Texas became the 28th state, and President Polk had already moved to place American troops in a position to confront the Mexican army if it chose to contest the issue. Almost four months earlier, General Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation—about three thousand men, including 2nd Lieutenant U. S. Grant’s 4th Infantry Regiment—moved down the Texas coast to Corpus Christi, a tiny village with an American trading post at the mouth of the Nueces River, whose main activity was smuggling American tobacco into Mexico. We were sent to provoke a fight, Grant would write forty years later, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it. ²

Along with Taylor’s army, President Polk was also making other preparations. On June 1, 1845, John C. Fremont, with Kit Carson as his guide, left St. Louis with a small group of explorers. By December, they were in California, ready to help if war broke out. Once war was declared in May 1846, Stephen Kearny led an expedition west from Fort Leavenworth to capture Santa Fe, continuing with a small force on to southern California, and John Wool led a force from San Antonio into northern Mexico. It was Zachary Taylor, however, who would start the war in Texas.

On March 8, 1846, Taylor began moving south from Corpus Christi and by April, he was on the Rio Grande River where he built a fortification that he called Fort Texas on the site of modern day Brownsville. From across the river, Mexican general Mariano Arista soon began sending small mounted raids across to harass the Americans, ambushing patrols and work parties.

Engraving of the charge by Captain May’s U.S. cavalry at Resaca de la Palma. BN

Early in May, Taylor was forced to take a large force to Port Isabel, about twenty-five miles away on the coast, to meet the ships bringing provisions, leaving Major Jacob Brown’s 7th Infantry Regiment and eight pieces of artillery to hold Fort Texas. With Taylor gone, General Arista crossed the Rio Grande with over three thousand troops and attacked. Taylor returned and in two days at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma he routed the Mexican troops and relieved the Fort Texas garrison. 2nd Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant led men in combat for the first time at Palo Alto and Zachary Taylor finally managed to start "Mr. Polk’s