Marathon Pundit: Ulysses S. Grant invades Mississippi

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Ulysses S. Grant invades Mississippi

General Ulysses S. Grant's first major battle of the Civil War was at Shiloh in Tennessee. Confederate forces led by Albert Sidney Johnston, who was killed on the first day of fighting, attacked Grant's army from their base in nearby Corinth, Mississippi.

A year later Grant's army won a series of battles in Mississippi, culminating in a decisive victory at Vicksburg. The lessons of Grant's Vicksburg campaign are still taught at military academies.

But the Chicago Tribune reports today that the South has risen again. In a legal battle over the largest collection of papers that belonged to the man who also served as our 18th president, Mississippi State University has come out on top.

Presidential libraries, historically speaking, are a fairly recent phenomenon. Franklin Roosevelt's library in Hyde Park, New York, was the first. The closest thing to a Grant library was at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, which is 50 miles north of Cairo, where General Grant assumed his first command.

The papers housed at SIU, however, belong to the Ulysses S. Grant Association, headed by renowned Abraham Lincoln scholar Frank Williams, the chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

John Simon was in charge of the papers stored at Southern, but was hit with a sexual harassment accusation. Amazingly, that's how the collection's march to the South began.

When Simon died in July, the association selected a new executive director: John Marszalek, professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State and a biographer of William T. Sherman, the Union general who was one of Grant's closest friends.

In August the association sued, accusing SIU of wrongfully detaining the Grant papers and claiming to be the lawful owner of the entire collection. Last month, after reaching an out-of-court settlement, SIU relinquished the papers. Both parties said the settlement prohibits them from discussing their break.

Rod Sievers, an SIU spokesman, confirmed that Simon was accused of sexual harassment but said he could not comment further except to say Simon was never fired.

Shortly before Christmas, movers packed all of the items into trucks and shipped them to Mississippi State's Mitchell Memorial Library.