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! 

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In Which Pickett's Charge Is A Metaphor

In the mornings, I usually get up well before Mr. Craft Knife, so when we're on a trip, I like to hop out of bed, get dressed, and head out with my nook to have a little snoopy around whatever free breakfast options there are in the hotel lobby. On this particular morning, I beelined for the coffee machine, waiting in line behind a guy dressed in pajama bottoms who was making a couple of cups.

As he moved aside to do his cream and sugar dance, I put my own cup under the spout and hit the button for coffee. It filled my cup something like 20% full, then stopped, so I hit the button again, which was apparently the signal for coffee to start streaming forever out of the spout and never stop again. I worriedly let my cup get 99% full and then pulled it away, but that meant that the coffee was now hitting the metal bottom of the dispenser instead, which caused it all to loudly and wildly splash EVERYWHERE. Like... just absolutely everywhere. I was horrified, the guy next to me was clearly horrified--but also comfortingly supportive! He handed me napkins and was all, "I'll pretend like nothing happened if you do!" It was very sweet, and I thanked him and used his napkins to mop up the mess while he escaped before I could spill coffee all over him, too.

I calmed my nerves over a book and a breakfast of white toast, cream cheese, and hard-boiled egg (I don't know why hotel breakfasts always have the most random assortment of breakfast foods, but this combo turned out to be DELICIOUS!)--

--then decided to brave the coffee machine again for a refill.

This time, a sign that I had not seen before was taped to the machine directly at my own personal eye level, and it said, "Please press button only ONCE for coffee." So I pressed the button--only once!--and, okay, the spout dispensed my coffee cup only about 25% full, then paused and made some grumbling noises, then started pouring again without me having to press anything else. Still, though, I kept my hand on the cup, at this point ready for anything...

...except for a voice right behind my ear that said, "Don't spill it!" Startled, I jerked away, meaning that the hand that was holding the coffee cup also jerked away, meaning that the coffee cup in my hand also jerked away, and once again a stream of coffee hit the metal bottom of the dispenser and began splashing EVERYWHERE. Horrified, I turned around and met the again equally horrified eyes of the same man from before, this time fully dressed, clearly just having gotten off of the elevator to see that crazy coffee lady again (still?) at the coffee machine, perfectly set up for him to say the funniest thing ever for us to both have a lighthearted chuckle at.

I tell my husband ALL THE TIME that I am incapable of interacting with other humans out in the wild, because every single time I do it gets weird, and he always tells me that cannot be true, that he himself is constantly interacting with people out in the wild without issue and surely all the weirdness is just all in my head.

And yet.

So let's go see some other people who made bad decisions out in public!

Next to this sign is another sign asking you to please not deface the Confederate memorial. I think that it's obviously correct and ethically sound not to deface this memorial, but I still feel like the miniature Confederate battle flags are a little much.

The day before this last day of battle, Robert E. Lee had gathered experiential evidence that neither attacking the left flank nor attacking the right flank of the Union line could get his Confederate forces through. So on this day, he'd planned to send his troops right through the middle. Major General Pickett's division hadn't actually done any fighting yet in this battle, so they were going to be in front, which I guess is why it's usually called Pickett's Charge even though several commanders and their divisions were involved. Shrug!

Throughout this whole plan, the guy who was supposed to have the overall command during this attack, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, was generally just a big wuss about the whole thing. He did not want to do it, said it wouldn't work, had a different idea that he thought would be better, but instead of obeying like he was supposed to, or flat-out disobeying like Sickles had the day before, he just hedged and hemmed and hawed and half-assed it and eventually obeyed, but only in the worst way possible that definitely fucked the whole thing up. He didn't start the charge when he was supposed to, which means that the Confederate attack on Culp's Hill at the Union right flank that was supposed to divide the Union forces wasn't simultaneous like it was supposed to be, so the Union could easily bring reinforcements to the center of the line. Pickett himself had to go find Longstreet and literally ask if he should start the charge, and even then Longstreet wouldn't give him a direct answer, but instead just bowed. Like... okay? What is THAT supposed to mean, Dude?

After Pickett left to go start the charge Longstreet even tried to get another guy to go find him and tell him nevermind, but that guy was all, "Bro, it is TOO LATE. WE ARE CHARGING."

I get that Longstreet was all morally quandried or whatever, but come on. It's not like this is your first day in the army! You know how armies be! You fish or you cut bait or you go hide in a basement with the rest of the civilians you've put in the middle of your war zone! It's fine that he was acting like a baby about this, though, because he was one of the bad guys.

While Longstreet was having his whole little dither, there was one of the largest ever cannonades also going on, which would probably have been a little cooler if either side could have seen where they were shooting. But they couldn't, so both sides mostly missed, but that also meant that the purpose of the Confederate cannonade, intended to soften up the center of the Union line so they didn't slaughter the Confederates like dogs during their infantry attack, did not work at all. It did run the cannons on both sides almost clean out of ammunition, though this was a bigger deal on the Confederate side. The Union cannons had done this sneaky trick of kind of petering out their cannon fire, as if their cannons were getting hit one by one and going off-line. This made the Confederates think that they were safe to charge, but when they did, the Union cannons started blasting them again.

The actual Confederate charge was so, so, so stupid, and it turned out so, so, so bad. They started from way back here--

--and most historians think they were probably using that copse of trees over my left shoulder as a visual marker. None of them ever got that far, though. For one thing, they were WALKING, not running, supposedly in formation until that devolved into chaos. Also, this area was literally people's farmland back then, fields separated from each other by extremely sturdy fences that had to be climbed over or through but that did not provide any shelter from gunfire to the person doing the climbing or scrambling. Cannons were just blindly firing at them, some from as far away as Little Round Top, and since they weren't aiming at anything in particular they never knew where they'd hit, so in the space of a second the spot next to you, and all your buddies in that spot, would simply be obliterated, and you never knew if you'd be next.

Here's the view out from the Union line (with my trusty guidebook in the foreground, obviously!):

You can barely see the monument that marks the beginning of the charge way far off in the background, kind of near the left corner-ish.

monument to the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

Obsessed with lining up my Gettysburg field guide just right so I can look up from the map and see the real place right in front of me. Major Magic Tree House vibes!

monument to the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry

monument to Brigadier General Alexander Webb

I wanted to walk the whole length of the charge but we really didn't have time for that, so here's what it looks like partway through, looking towards the Union line:

The copse of trees is on the right, and the whole ridge is lined with Union cannons. The last time that I visited Gettysburg, with my kids, we did not know that you're not supposed to climb on the cannons--oops!

monument to the 59th New York Infantry

monument to the 42nd New York Infantry

The whole attack lasted less than an hour, and it was the disaster that knocked the fight right out of the Confederate side. They had a casualty rate of over 50%, and anyone who could have reasonably been in charge near the front lines was part of that, so there was nobody to organize a proper retreat--Confederate soldiers just ran back the way they'd come, or stayed hiding in the ditches on either side of Emmitsburg Road and waited to be taken prisoner.

I grew up in the South, where my education about the Civil War was not even-handed, but I still see Pickett's Charge as a metaphor for the Antebellum South--though not in the way that it was taught to me. I don't share a geographical nostalgia for the days of chattel slavery or a wistful, "if only" feeling about the racist bullshit that is the Lost Cause. I do, however, recognize what it looks like when a bunch of elites throw a bunch of poors at a cause as literal or metaphorical cannon fodder. They're still doing it today, throwing the ignorant poors with their ill-funded grade school public educations and resultant lifelong media and cultural illiteracy at Republican ideals, getting them to wear their stupid Trump hats and fly their stupid Trump flags--which all cost money!--and pretend like it's awesome that gas prices are exorbitant and screwworms are infecting cattle herds and their children are once again marching off to be on the wrong side of a war.

And god forbid any of us try to move on with our zero generational wealth and focus on carefully educating our children, doing double the work since it often requires re-educating ourselves, battling through unfair taxes that the rich don't pay and student loan debts that they don't have and wages that don't rise to match inflation that they don't have to worry about. We can support and encourage our kids to attend amazing colleges and study in useful fields as much as we want, but federal funding for early career scientists and every kind of public servant BUT the fat cat politician will get cut before they can even graduate with their hard-earned degrees from their amazing colleges, so back to blue collar work they go.

Anyway, let's go look at where Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address next.

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Dan Sickles Did A Bad Job At The Battle Of Gettysburg

Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg is all about how much Dan Sickles sucks. 

First of all, he was a child molester, marrying a 15-year-old child when he himself was 32 years old.

Then a few years later, he murdered that wife's affair partner, Philip Barton Key II, who also happened to be the adult son of Francis Scott Key (Key was also several years older than Teresa, the wife, who was still only 21 or 22 years old by this time). And mind you, this is after Sickles himself got so involved with a sex worker that he took the sex worker with him on vacation to England, where he also TOOK HER TO MEET QUEEN VICTORIA. 

What. An. Asshole.

Anyway, after the affairs on both sides, after the murder, after the trial during which he becomes the first person in the United States to use the temporary insanity defense, the Civil War starts, and Sickles, who'd low-key been a militiaman since the 1850s, became more active--having one's boots on the ground was a good way to repair one's dodgy political reputation! He always seemed to have some reason out of his control to keep him out of many of the actual battles (ahem), but he did do a cool thing in that whenever freedom seekers found his camp, he'd assist them, get them jobs and military training and stuff. So that was good, but overall, he was still an asshole.

Okay, so on the morning of July 2, Major General Meade--you know, the guy who was in charge of the ENTIRE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC?!?--told Sickles to anchor the very leftmost flank of the army in a very specific spot. Remember how the Union had ended the night before on top of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill? On this day, Meade wanted to line up against the Confederates in a sort of upside down fishhook shape south of the town, everyone facing outward. Culp's Hill was the right flank, with forces extending a little bit south along that hill. From Culp's Hill forces were stationed west to a little past Cemetery Hill, then south along a ridgeline, Cemetery Ridge, to just north of Little Roundtop. Meade told Sickles to hold that that specific spot just north of Little Round Top.

In the below screenshot you can see Cemetery Ridge topographically, although I think the forces were actually mostly stationed just to its west. Sickles was basically supposed to hold the line south from about the "Chubby's" to the "Monument" straight north, with other guys to help him out north of that and Little Round Top to block the way through south of that. Sickles held that spot for a little bit, but then he decided that he personally liked the Peach Orchard better, so he gave the order and marched his entire corps away from where they were supposed to be, moving them forward nearly a mile and causing a huge, obvious gap in the line.

Meanwhile, this guy, Brigadier General Warren--

--was doing exactly what his statue depicts: standing on top of Little Round Top with binoculars, checking out the battlefield. Facing the northwest, he didn't see Sickles' corps at the base of Little Round Top, where they were supposed to be, but waaaaaay out there in that green field you can see a little sliver of behind the trees:

Mr. Craft Knife and Gouverneur Warren do not understand why Sickles' corps is so far away from their post!

Even worse, though, was that when he looked to the southwest, he saw glints of light and realized that they came from the bayonets of Confederate soldiers, who he realized could easily just march northeast, straight past Sickles' corps, and over Little Round Top to get right through the Union line. This view to the southwest shows their super easy path. Devil's Den, which will be important in a minute, is to the right:

Warren is trying to point out the danger to me, but I'm looking in the wrong direction entirely!

Warren basically ran immediately to go tell Meade, who then immediately went to check on the situation, but by then it was too late to get Sickles' troops back into their proper spot, because the Confederates started attacking. 

A messenger was sent to ask for reinforcements from one specific division, but before the messenger reached that division he ran into a completely different brigade commander, and when that commander heard the message, he took it upon himself to run his own four regiments up to Little Round Top, and it's those four regiments who saved the situation.

Some of the Confederate forces tried to fight their way up the west side of Little Round Top--

--but it's super rocky and exposed, AND uphill, and some of these soldiers had already been marching 20 miles that day. Earlier, they'd stopped for a rest and because they were out of water, a few guys gathered up everyone's canteens and made a quick run to the nearby creek to fill them. But while the guys were gone, they got orders to move out, and the canteen carriers still hadn't caught up with them. So they mostly got shot down like dogs, dehydrated and exhausted, on the western slope of Little Round Top.

Some other Confederate forces instead tried to go up and over Round Top so they could sneak up Little Round Top from the south, but they were met by the 20th Maine, commanded by Chamberlain, who had been told to hold this left flank of the Union army at all costs with his 385 soldiers.

This monument marks the left flank of the entire Union army.

There were so few soldiers to hold the entire southern edge of Little Round Top that they stretched out side by side in a single file instead of in their tidy Napoleonic rows, then, when they started to run out of ammunition, they fixed their bayonets and charged down Little Round Top in a counterattack of hand-to-hand fighting, as depicted in this Ghost of Paul Revere song:

Meanwhile, Sickles' guys were now the leading edge of this entire attack since they were so far in front of everyone else, so they ended up getting super spread out trying to keep Confederates from getting around them. Their line, which had just been meant to cover between the northern edge of Little Round Top to the southern edge of the Second Corp, now straggled from the Peach Orchard southeast to the Wheatfield, then due south to Devil's Den. All three spots had some of the bloodiest fighting of the battle, thanks to Sickles.

We skipped the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard, but we were curious about Devil's Den--so rocky!--so we stopped there to have a little snoopy around:

Full disclosure: somehow during this specific hike, Mr. Craft Knife must have walked through a nest of ticks or something, because he got about 1,000 ticks on him! Even the next morning, we checked out of the hotel and hopped into the car, ready to grab breakfast and the little kid and then book it back to Ohio for the big kid's graduation, and as I slid into the passenger seat I saw yet another tick clinging to the ceiling over the driver's seat, ready to drop onto his head.

So, if you go to Devil's Den, wear lots of permethrin and be careful not to brush against the greenery!

This is the view from the top of Devil's Den towards the eastern side of Little Round Top. You can't really see it in this photo, but if you zoom in about a thousand percent on my original photo, you can see a really cool monument to the 40th New York Infantry, with a soldier holding a rifle hiding behind the stone plaque and peeking over at you where you stand on top of Devil's Den. The 40th New York Infantry commander's official report is here, and when he gets to 4:00 he starts describing this attack.

This is the view a little to the south of the previous photo. The wooded area is Round Top, and the Confederates who met Chamberlain's force came through those woods, down into the little valley between Round Top and Little Round Top, and up into the woods you can see on the south side of Little Round Top. And then Chamberlain's soldiers ran them down with bayonets.

And here's me in the middle of Devil's Den itself, somehow not crouching in a nest of ticks!

The foreground of this photo looks alarmingly brushy, however, so now I'm wondering if Mr. Craft Knife did in fact sacrifice his health to get this perfect shot of me...

Devil's Den kind of feels like both a terrible and a wonderful place to fight. I have a couple of friends who are into Airsoft, and I bet if someone ever made an Airsoft arena that recreates this space, they would be booked solid at any admission price. You probably couldn't recreate via Airsoft the Union cannons on the west side of this hill, aimed to repel the first Confederate wave, or the Confederate sharpshooters on the east side, stationed after they'd taken the hill to snipe Union officers on Little Round Top.

Looking down at the Slaughter Pen area, probably already with his 1,000 ticks along for the ride.

By the end of July 2, the Union held Little Round Top and the Confederates held Devil's Den. The Union used cannons set up on Little Round Top to fire at Confederate forces to the north during the next day's battle, and Confederate snipers continued to pick off Union soldiers as they could find them from their nests on Devil's Den. 

But Sickles wouldn't be there to see that, because earlier on this day, a cannonball damaged his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. But that limb, at least, wouldn't be tossed outside through a broken window to land in a big pile of amputated limbs in some poor farmer's yard; Sickles, like the absolute psychopath that he was, kept his amputated leg, had the flesh removed, and then donated it to a museum--where it is still on exhibit!

While that was happening, though, further north along Cemetery Ridge was also seeing major fighting. Sickles' forces who had spread out along the Peach Orchard were falling back towards Cemetery Ridge, which means that the Confederates chasing them were now causing Cemetery Ridge to be attacked not just from the west, but also from the southwest. Soldiers, especially ones using tactics last relevant during the Napoleonic Wars, don't do as well when they're attacked on two fronts.

I wanted to take a photo towards the west, where the Confederate line would have been, but I'm not quite oriented correctly. If you want to know where the enemy was, you should always look where the cannons are pointed!

But this was also basically the center of the Union line (the next day's Pickett's Charge, also meant to break the center of the Union line, is just to the north of this spot), so breaking through here would give a huge boost to the Confederate forces. Individual Union artillery and infantry units suffered shocking casualty rates--out of the 262 soldiers of the 1st Minnesota infantry, 47 survived their charge toward the Confederate line here that was solely intended to buy time for more Union reinforcements to arrive--but the Union forces managed to hold Cemetery Ridge, which put everything in motion for a new Confederate push against the center of the Union line on the next, final day of the battle.

Caught my guy reading from our Bible, A Field Guide to Gettysburg, in exactly one photo, even though this book was in someone's hand constantly. It orients you to exactly where to face at each spot--at Little Round Top, it described actual specific rocks, and they were right where the book said they would be!--and then tells you exactly what happened there, what you could see at the time and what it looks like now, how it contributed to the battle and the war as a whole, etc. I swear that this trip would have been nearly meaningless without it.

Sickles spent the rest of his life trying to sully Meade's reputation and insisting that he'd been right and Meade had been wrong about the best spot for his troops to be that day--never mind that he'd defied a direct order and fucked up the whole battle plan. Meade was definitely right, though. If Sickles had held the line and not stretched his forces out at an angle in front of everyone else, the Confederate forces would have come up against a better established line with more manpower and gunpower. Although it's definitely possible that if it had been Sickles, and not Chamberlain, on the southern face of Little Round Top, he'd have done a bad job and the Confederates would have ended up taking it, and then there would have been no Union artillery to attack the right flank of the big Confederate charge the next day.

Which is where we're going next!

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!