The Old Farmer's Almanac 2015 (29 page)

Lieutenant General Grant
became the 18th president of the United States. Some historians regard him as a failure in that office, but in his own time, he was enormously popular. First elected in 1868, he was returned to office by a landslide in 1872.

Grant wrote his memoirs, which were published by Mark Twain, while in a race with throat cancer. In spite of his illness, he wrote 275,000 words in less than a year and completed the book shortly before his death in 1885. It was a best-seller and remains one of the greatest military memoirs ever put to paper. Both Union and Confederate veterans marched in his funeral procession.

General in Chief Lee,
who might have been tried for treason had it not been for the personal intervention of Grant, became president of Virginia’s Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). To avoid any suggestion that he might return to the fight, he refused to even march in step with his college’s cadets. He died in 1870, revered by millions.

One of the first surrender witnesses to die was former Illinois newspaperman
Lt. Col. Theodore S. Bowers,
known to his friends as “Joe.” He came into the army as a private, was assigned to headquarters as a clerk, won Grant’s liking, and was commissioned a staff officer.

Early in the war, Bowers grew angry about traders who were buying cotton from secessionist farmers. In Grant’s presence, he once burst out, “Well, I think I’ll resign and go into cotton. At least I would if I had the money.” Grant tossed him a silver half-dollar and said, “Here, Joe, take this for a stake.” Bowers had those words engraved on the coin, which he kept as a good luck charm. It was in his pocket when he was killed in a railroad accident 11 months after Appomattox.

Brig. Gen. Orville E. Babcock
became President Grant’s private secretary. In this position, he wielded enormous influence and power and faced many temptations.

In 1875, he was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury in a scandal known as the Whiskey Ring. With the help of a deposition filed in his defense by President Grant—a type of White House intervention not occurring before or since—he was acquitted in the following year.

After being indicted, tried, and acquitted in a second corruption case, Babcock was able to escape Washington politics thanks to an appointment by Grant as chief engineer of two lighthouse districts. He drowned when his small boat overturned in the Mosquito Inlet, Florida, in 1884.

Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan
commanded the Union cavalry at the end of the war. Grant said, “I believe General Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal.” He backed up his high opinion of Sheridan by relying on him for the toughest assignments during and after the war.

After Lee’s surrender, Grant immediately sent Sheridan to the Southwest to restore Texas and Louisiana to Union control and help the Mexican leader Benito Juarez get rid of a French occupying army.

Sheridan’s next assignment was to pacify the Plains Indians, which he achieved using the same scorched-earth tactics that he had employed against the Confederates. Although he was reputed to have said “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” (he denied it all his life), in 1878 he spoke up for his former foes: “We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?”

Even in peacetime, Sheridan moved swiftly and decisively. He mobilized troops to fight the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and, in the 1880s, he was instrumental in preserving the Yellowstone wilderness from commercial development. Sheridan died in 1888.

Lt. Col. Adam Badeau
served as one of Grant’s aides. Capt. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was also on Grant’s staff, told Badeau how he had once fallen off a train platform, only to be pulled to safety by the famous actor Edwin Booth. Badeau, who knew both Edwin and his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, from his days writing theater reviews in New York, wrote to Edwin to thank him for saving the president’s son.

Badeau aided Grant in the preparation of the president’s memoirs, but there was a dispute about payment and credit. Badeau subsequently settled with Grant’s heirs for $10,000. He died in 1895, having written several books about his Civil War experiences.

Lt. Col. Ely S. Parker,
a full-blooded chief of the Seneca nation, wrote out the final copy of the terms of Lee’s surrender. When he was introduced to Parker, Lee said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker later stated, “I shook his hand and said, ‘We are all Americans.’”

In 1869, President Grant appointed Parker as the first Native American Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Parker did his best to promote Grant’s policy of peaceful relations with the western tribes but was undercut by white bureaucrats and criticized by his own people for marrying a white woman. He left the government, made a fortune on Wall Street, lost it, and ended his days as a clerk in the New York City Police Department. He died in 1895. In 1897, his body was reinterred in Buffalo, New York, next to the famous Seneca chief Red Jacket, one of his ancestors.

As assistant provost marshal,
Brig. Gen. George H. Sharpe
paroled 28,000 Confederate Army soldiers—including General Lee—after the surrender. In 1867, he went to Europe looking for Americans who might have been involved in the assassination of President Lincoln. He managed to bring back John Surratt, son of one of the convicted conspirators, whose eventual trial ended in a hung jury. Sharpe lived until 1900.