Nobody Was Rude To Me At Ulysses S. Grant's House... This Time

A decade ago, when I blogged about visiting the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site with my kids, I claimed at the end that I had "mostly forgiven" the park ranger there who had 1) told my child that the answer to a specific question in her Junior Ranger book could have been found by watching the park film if only she'd paid attention, when in fact that information was NOT given in the park film and I knew it, and 2) informed me that in her experience leading field trips, homeschooled children were "less curious" than public and private schoolchildren.

Saying that I'd mostly forgiven her was a lie, obviously, because I still bitch about that ranger regularly. I have never forgotten nor forgiven a single person who has ever been rude to me or my kids on the subject of homeschooling (or any subject, frankly), and I will still, with the barest of excuses, tell you the entire story, quoted dialogue and all, of that time that a random dude sitting next to me at a wedding told me that he didn't approve of homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a random woman at a party told me she didn't believe in homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a relative, a few months after I had started homeschooling, asked me if my four-year-old had "regressed in her academics" since she'd "dropped out of preschool."

And it's not like I was sitting there monologuing about homeschooling any of those times, either, but if a random person making small talk asked me back in the day what I did for a living, that's literally what I did!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site Junior Ranger book, with the contentious question:

Here are screenshots from the two relevant scenes in the park film, in which the man in question is referred to solely as "William":

If you could zoom in on that document in the film you could see his name, because that's his manumission paper! You cannot see it in the film, however.

As you can see, I have never gotten over even the smallest slight or forgiven any person for even the slightest wrongdoing ever in my entire life.

Nor do I intend to start now, apparently, since when Mr. Craft Knife, our older kid, and I were getting out of the car for this most recent visit to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I announced that if any park ranger dared to say one negative thing about homeschooling to me, I was going to burn down Ulysses' house.

Mr. Craft Knife was all, "We're literally just three fully grown adults here. Nobody is going to talk to you about homeschooling!"

And luckily for all of us, he was right!

I did nevertheless manage to be disappointed in the site since we were there on Juneteenth but there was no programming, or even acknowledgment, of the holiday there. Such a bummer, and I'm wondering if I should have gone to the Gateway Arch instead, because surely the park that held the Dred Scott trial would be having a Juneteenth celebration, but ah, well. I looked at a lot of stuff and read a lot of museum labels anyway!

I thought this ink blotter was super cool. They put a mirror underneath it so you could see all of the times Grant had blotted his signature there:

This is a historical recreation of Julia Dent Grant's wedding dress, watered silk and all!

There was some other Queen Victoria memorabilia elsewhere in the museum that, along with this wedding dress, gave me to understand that Julia Dent Grant was a fan of the Royals. Understandable, and also SAME, GIRL, but low-key scandalous in my opinion barely a hundred years after the Revolutionary War...

One of my favorite parts of visiting a national park site is collecting titles of books that I can spend the next few months reading. I found ebooks of this--

--and this--

--and I'll get to them pretty soon, but currently I am hyperfixated on George Washington Carver so it might take me a minute.

I don't really know what it is about daguerreotypes, but they are so life-like! Julia Dent Grant and her sons aren't even colored realistically, but to me they still look like they could step right off that metal plate. And bonus points for little boys dressed like girls!

It looked like most of the exhibit on slavery that we'd seen during our previous visit had been replaced by that exhibit on Julia Dent Grant, but a few artifacts were still there, including this bill of sale, which is easily the most upsetting item in the museum. Jefferson was only eighteen. Louisa was only seventeen, and described as a "mulatress," as well, signifying that she's already experienced generational violence. At least she's being trafficked with at least one of her children, a one-year-old, but clearly neither of these teenagers are the parents of six-year-old Kitty who is also being trafficked to Julia in this bill of sale. That poor baby...

I'm suspicious that Julia could possibly have been as naive as she's portrayed here, so I'll be curious to dive into that memoir!

That label also sent me on a different deep dive, because when I read it I was all, "They still had people enslaved here in 1864? But the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863???" 

Okay, so for everyone else who was as underserved in their US History as I was (and apparently I underserved my children, as well, oops--you know us homeschoolers and our lack of curiosity!), the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically freed only the slaves held in Confederate states. I knew that, and I knew that there were states that were both not in the Confederacy AND were slaveholding states, such as Missouri and Kentucky, but I guess I hadn't connected the dots. Juneteenth, which we were also celebrating on this day, was about the last enslaved people finally being told about the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, and I'd assumed those were the very last slaves ever in the United States, but those were the last Confederate slaves ever. There were literally still people being legally enslaved for several more months! Missouri had already abolished slavery, although not until January 11, 1865, but Kentucky and Delaware, as well as New Jersey and its habit of apprenticing people for life, hung on until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.

So, new holiday idea: we also need to celebrate every December 6, because nobody's free until everybody's free!

Check out this notable coral fossil that was found embedded in some roots on the property:

And the summer kitchen, where enslaved people cooked and did laundry for the white members of the household:

 

I wanted to see where the enslaved people had lived, and the land where they'd labored, but that's all neighborhoods now:

Random, but this was on the bulletin board next to the bathrooms, specifically this dude's pose that is twinning with Grant, is genuinely the best thing ever:

I will NOT be driving back to St. Louis to attend his dinner and colloquy, however, because tickets cost ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS. 

Instead, we went to Fitz's--

--where I ordered something appropriately festive for Juneteenth:

And it wouldn't be a proper field trip if you weren't learning how something is made, so here's a look at their working bottling facility:

Oh, and his name was William Jones! 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!