Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,347
By This is the grave of Frederick Grant.
Born in 1850 in St. Louis, Grant was the son of the legendary Ulysses S. Grant, who was very much not legendary when his boy was born. In fact, Grant was seen as a failure and embarrassment. So it’s not as if young Frederick grew up with his dad as the national hero he would later become. Frederick just went to the public schools. When the Civil War started in 1861, his dad at first brought the boy with him, but soon sent him home. But the young boy was pretty addicted to war. He kept showing up for battles and he though he was a kid, his dad would accommodate him. At Vicksburg, our 13 year old boy got shot in the leg by a sniper; the only reason it wasn’t amputated like everyone else’s is that his father was the general and so he got extra treatment that managed to save it. He then got typhoid and survived that too. So he might have been a kid, but young Grant got pretty much the full Civil War experience.
It was hardly surprising that Grant would get into West Point in 1866. He graduated in 1870, by which time his father was president. Now, the reputation of Ulysses has risen in the last fifteen years or so, really quite too far. He was a terrible president, but he wasn’t an overt racist. Well, Frederick, he pretty much was an overt racist. In 1870, James Webster Smith became the first Black cadet at West Point. The poor guy was subjecting to horrendous hazing and violence. Who was one of the gang torturing Smith? Yep, it was Frederick Grant. There’s been some effort to revisit this question and make Grant look better and I haven’t looked at these sources myself, so I can’t say. But at the very least, the evidence is pretty strong that Grant was very racist and that he approved of what happened to Smith, who died in 1876 after being forced out of West Point.
Grant was, to use the parlance of our times, a nepo baby. That was pretty much his career. He was Grant’s son and that’s what he was. He ended up being named Sherman’s aide-de-camp on the general’s tour of Europe. Then Sheridan made him one of his staff. He rose to lieutenant colonel quickly, despite not having really done anything. When his father did his world tour in 1877, the Army said, sure! take the year off! Grant did fight in some of the wars of genocide in the 1870s and early 1880s, but only in very minor roles.
Grant left the Army in 1881. He helped his father with the memoirs, though not nearly as much as Mark Twain helped. He took various jobs in business, playing on his father’s name and his connections in Washington. He ran for Secretary of State in New York in 1887, but lost in a generally favorable moment for Democrats. Based on nothing but his father’s name, Benjamin Harrison named him minister to Austria-Hungary in 1889 and he held on to that through the president’s term. He was then named to the police commission in New York City.
Grant did rejoin the Army in 1898 when the U.S. decided to become an imperialist power and for the first time in his life, he actually kind of did well on his own. He was initially a colonel of volunteers but was quickly promoted to brigadier general. He was part of the occupation of Puerto Rico and then went to the Philippines, staying there until 1902 and being promoted to brigadier general in the real Army. He was promoted to major general upon his return and was deeply involved in the promoting the YMCA on military posts. This part of a larger effort to bring the YMCA into all-male spaces as a way to control unruly behavior and radical politics; the same thing would happen soon after in the timber camps of the Pacific Northwest, for example. In 1910, he was promoted to commander of the Department of the East. After all these years, he really had a career of his own. He stuck to it and became an important senior military officer.
Alas, Grant would come down with cancer and also had diabetes. So he was not healthy, no more than his father was. He died in 1912, only 61 years old. In fact, he was the second most senior active officer at the time.
Frederick Grant is buried in the United States Military Academy Post Cemetery, West Point, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other ministers to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and I think this is a level of gold never before seen in this august series, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alexander Lawton, Harrison’s predecessor and a general who committed treason in defense of slavery, is in Savannah, Georgia. Harrison’s successor, Bartlett Tripp, is in Yankton, South Dakota, which based on the language of Deadwood means that he has to be referred to as one of those Yankton Cocksuckers. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.