Ulysses S. Grant: A Look Back

 

This year the Hayes Presidential Library and Museumsat Spiegel Grove will  celebrate the 200^th birthday of the 19^th president who was born in Delaware, Ohio on October 4, 1822. Celebrations will soon be underway for another Ohio president, also born 200 years ago. Ulysses S. Grant was born on the 27^th of this month near the Ohio River at Point Pleasant. The son of a tanner and later a West Point graduate and a veteran of the War with Mexico, Grant suffered innumerable failures and setbacks in his personal life.

                                                        

                                    

                                        General Ulysses S. Grant

But with quiet confidence and enduring love for his wife Julia, Grant in 7 years rose from a lowly clerk in his father’s store to commander of all the Union armies and President of the United States.

As president, Grant advanced the Reconstruction agenda, battled the KKK, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. There were mistakes and scandals. Yet, he became the most well-known and popular American of his time. When Grant left office after two terms, future President James Garfield wrote, “No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves today.”

While a great general, Ulysses S. Grant was a poor businessman. Swindled by his son’s brokerage partner, Grant found himself destitute.  A short time later, his doctors gave him the sad diagnosis of throat cancer. With a death sentence before him, Grant could only think of providing a way out of poverty for his beloved Julia.

Mark Twain offered an advance of $25,000 for publication of each of 2 volumes of his military memoirs, but Grant refused believing that Twain would lose money. They settled on a profit sharing deal. Even though he was in a race against time, Grant proved to be a gifted writer. Through excruciating pain, fits of coughing and at times, unable to eat or speak, he continued to write. Finally, on July 19th, 1885, Grant penned his final words. Four days later, the man who had saved the Union breathed his last. More than one million people, both Union and Confederate, attended his funeral in New York City.

                                                         

Grant Writing his "Personal Memoirs"

Grant’s “Personal Memoirs” became America’s first blockbuster. As he had hoped, Julia lived on in comfort, receiving $450,000 from Twain’s firm. To this day, his work has never been out of print. Every president since, has consulted Grant’s memoirs when writing their own.

                                                              

                                      Tomb of Ulysses S. Grant

                                              

As one historian wrote, “In the generations after his death in 1885, Grant’s reputation as a general and president spiraled downward until the current generation of biographers and historians has persuasively resurrected it.” Another wrote, “…how fortunate the nation was that Grant went into the world – to save the Union, to lead it and, on his deathbed, to write one of the finest memoirs in all of American letters.” Pick up one of these recent biographies or better yet, read his “Personal Memoirs.” They do not disappoint.

                                                         

                  Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, First Edition

 

Life and Times of Judge Aaron Levisee

 

Few Sandusky County pioneers led a more eventful life than Aaron Levisee. Born in Livingston County, New York in 1821, Levisee moved to Sandusky County at the age of 10. Bright, energetic, and the youngest of 11 children, Levisee was forced to find his own way in the world. He eventually attended the University of Michigan which led directly to teaching positions in Louisiana and then Alabama. Hungering for more education, Levisee came north once more to study law in New York before returning to Talladega where he became head of the Female Collegiate Institute of Talladega.

                                                                   

Judge Aaron Levisee

The following year, he married Persia Willis who had grown up at “Thornhill,” a 2600-acre cotton plantation nearby. After their marriage, the couple moved to Shreveport where Aaron opened a law practice and presented his bride with their new home, also called “Thornhill.” The couple had only one son, Leonidas.

                                                             

 

                             Thornhill Plantation, Talladega, Alabama

Aaron continued to practice law in Shreveport and was elected judge of his district. Although respected by those who knew him, Judge Levisee lost support when he took a stand against the South’s secession movement. Despite his unpopularity he remained in the South throughout the war, eventually serving the Confederacy as an attache to the Inspector General. After Persia’s death in 1862, “Thornhill” served as a Confederate military hospital.

                                                                       

                          Thornhill Shreveport, Louisiana

During the Reconstruction era, he was elected successively as a judge and state legislator from the district that includes Shreveport. Levisee presided over the trial of Ku Klux Klan members who murdered an African American for casting a vote for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election. He assumed his duties as a legislator in 1874 at the height of an armed conflict between Republican supporters and the White League over control of the state legislature.

He served as one of six Louisiana presidential electors during the controversial Hayes/Tilden election. Levisee refused a bribe to cast his vote for Democrat Tilden. But on the appointed December day when the presidential electors were to cast their votes at New Orleans, Levisee and another elector were snowed in at the Red River. It was not until more than a year later, when the Democratic Congress was continuing its investigation of the disputed election that he learned his signature had been forged and then sent on to Washington!

Having lost a second wife during the Civil War and another shortly after marriage, Levisee moved with his son to the Pacific Northwest and then the Dakota Territory. It was here that he again opened a law practice. He also performed a massive work by preparing and publishing an annotated edition of the legal codes adopted by the state of South Dakota. In 1893, Judge Levisee’s life came full circle. He returned to Sandusky County,where he lived out his final years, dying in 1907. The diary, detailing the eventful life of Judge Levisee can be found at the Library of Congress. The original “Thornhill” plantation and the Shreveport estate named “Thornhill,” built for his first wife Persia, still survive.

 

 

 

 

 

The Courageous Laura Haviland

 After reading my article about the Underground Railroad published in Lifestyles 2000, my friend told me about her great aunt, Laura Haviland. In fact, she shared her first edition of Laura’s autobiography, “A Woman’s Life Work.” (You can find a full transcription of the book online.) Laura was born in Canada in 1808 to American Quaker parents, Daniel and Sene Smith. At the age of 16, she married Charles Haviland. Shortly after, they moved with other Quakers to Lenawee County, Michigan.

Quakers had always condemned slavery, but initially did not work actively for abolition. Restless, determined, and driven to action, Laura Haviland took up the more active role of Wesleyan Methodists to fight slavery. With Elizabeth Chandler, Laura formed the Logan FemaleAnti-Slavery Society, the first abolitionist organization in Michigan.  The Havilands began hiding fugitive slaves. Their home became the first Underground Railroad station in Michigan.

                       

                        Laura Haviland Statue in Adrian, Michigan                    

Laura also founded the Raisin Institute, the first racially integrated school in Michigan. The Havilands brought several teachers from Ohio’s Oberlin College who helped them make it one of the best schools in the territory.

In 1845, the family was struck by erysipelas. Laura became desperately ill. Upon her recovery she learned that her husband, sister, parents, and young baby had died. Despite these tragedies, Laura remained as determined as ever to carry on her battle against slavery.

She made trips into the Deep South to aid escaped slaves. In an effort to bring the children of a fugitive slave couple to freedom in Michigan, she traveled to the tavern of slave owner John Chester of Washington County, Tennessee. Chester held Laura, her son, and another at gunpoint, threatening to kill them. They managed to escape only to be chased by slave catchers. For the next 15 years, Chester and his son harassed Laura Haviland in court, with slave catchers, and with threats of violence. After the Fugitive Slave Act, she began escorting runaway slaves to Canada. In 1851, she helped found the Refugee Home Society in Windsor, Ontario, a settlement with a church, school, and 25 acres for each family. 

When the Civil War broke out, Haviland traveled throughout the South, distributing supplies, caring for the wounded, and working for better hospital conditions as far the Gulf of Mexico. At war’s end General O. O. Howard appointed Haviland Inspector of Hospitals for the Freedmen’s Bureau. Haviland traveled to Virginia, Tennessee, Kansas, and Washington, D.C. teaching, lecturing, and volunteering as a nurse.

The Raisin Institute went through many changes, becoming the Haviland Home, an orphanage for African American children. Eventually, the home was purchased by the state and became known as the Michigan Orphan Asylum.

Even in her later years Laura Haviland continued to work tirelessly to help freed slaves. Using her own money, Laura bought 240 acres in Kansas where African Americans escaping the violence of the KKK could farm, raise their children, and attend school. Both Haviland, Kansas and Haviland, Ohio were named in her honor. The image nearby is that of a statue of Laura Haviland in Adrian, Michigan.