Published: July 03, 2008 11:20 pm            

4th of July is historical for more than one reason

Our country’s Independence Day — Fourth of July — holiday is such a pleasurable date to get to pen an opinion column. The Fourth of July holiday just might be our most celebrated secular holiday. We thrive on it; we love it.

Though the kids and big kids lighting the fuses probably don’t conceive of it this way, the popping of the firecrackers and luminary brilliance of exploding bottle rockets in the sky symbolize the battles of the American Revolution. We may take added measures of appreciation for our Revolutionary War heroes when we consider how much they were laying on the line and how close they came to losing it all. Had the French — whom we lampoon today with nonce expressions like “freedom fries” — not intervened on our side, we almost certainly would not have expelled the mighty British Army from the 13 colonies. Today we would be drinking tea every day at noon and driving cars on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side and filling them up with $4 per gallon petrol, not gasoline.

The well-trained, well-supplied, disciplined British expeditionary forces skunked our Revolutionary troops in almost every military encounter during the war, except for Saratoga, until the French joined in the fray, not because the French loved American colonists so much but because they despised the British so much.

Yes, July 4, 1776, is the date our most brilliant, brave colonial leaders delivered their Declaration of Independence to the British. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most well-written, intellectually potent and forceful documents ever written.

We are right to enshrine and hero worship Declaration drafters like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and 52 other brilliant leaders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence. To the British Monarchy and Parliament, these men were all guilty of treason and sedition against the crown and were therefore subject to be put to death.

These were brave men indeed.

But other great national events mark July 4.

On this noble date in 1863, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s forces accepted the surrender of the city of Vicksburg, Miss., and its Confederate garrison there. The Union capture of Vicksburg, which overlooked the Mississippi River, opened up the entire length of the river to Union navigation, all the way from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. In military terms, this was very significant because it enabled the Union to move troops and materiel to decisive battle points quickly and relatively safely, much more quickly in fact than the Confederates could move to the same pivotal location.

Most Americans learn at least a little about U.S. Grant during their school days. At the minimum, we learn Grant was the general in charge of all Union forces who accepted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in 1865.

Ulysses S. Grant is a fascinating man to study. He came from middle-class beginnings. His father was a leather tanner in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Grant finished about the middle of his West Point class of 1843 and then served with distinction during the Mexican War. Then his biography gets really interesting.

The Army sent Capt. Grant out West to a couple of different remote Army posts on the West Coast. Grant was married by then and was very devoted to his wife, Julia, who remained behind with her family in St. Louis. Grant became depressed and drank as an alcoholic. According to the definitive biography, written by William McFeely, Grant had an abrasive relationship with his boss, Lt. Col. Robert C. Buchanan, and Grant resigned his Army commission with little advance notice on July 31, 1854. It was strange for a West Point graduate with 11 years of active military duty to just up and quit like that.

Grant returned to his family in St. Louis and became a farmer, an endeavor in which he failed after about four years. He then worked as a bill collector in St. Louis for about two years but failed at that. Grant became so desperate, he cut firewood on his family farm and hawked it to people on street corners in St. Louis, according to McFeely’s book.

Out of final desperation, in 1860, Grant asked his father, with whom Grant was not close, for a job. Jesse Grant put Ulysses to work as an assistant to Ulysses’ younger brother at a leather tannery Jesse owned in Galena, Ill. The two Grant brothers sold harnesses, saddles and other leather goods. It must have seen at least somewhat humiliating for Ulysses Grant, a West Point graduate and war veteran, to work as an assistant to his younger brother.

It almost seems Grant the military genius was incubating inside him the entire seven years he struggled as a civilian. With regard to the Civil War, Ulysses Grant was the right man for the right job at the right time. His Big Black River Campaign, in May 1863, is considered one of the brilliant military campaigns of all time. Grant took his force of 45,000 Union troops across Mississippi, in Confederate-held territory, and lived off the land.

The campaign forced the Confederate garrison commander at Vicksburg to release some troops out of the city to go after Grant’s force. These troops were then cut off from Vicksburg and forced to mix in with another Confederate unit. The Big Black River Campaign also influenced the Confederate general to keep the bridge over the Big Black River open, which Grant used to cross and then begin the siege of Vicksburg, which the Confederate general surrendered on July 4, 1863.

Ulysses S. Grant, like Abraham Lincoln, the man who promoted him to general in chief, is a man we average Americans can relate to.



Kinnamon is online/special projects editor of the News & Eagle. Contact him at davidk@enidnews.com.