In spring 1861, Ulysses S. Grant took a few days off from mustering volunteers for Illinois units of the Union Army to visit St. Louis. He found a tense atmosphere in the great metropolis of the West. Most Missourians and many St. Louisans were ready to join the Confederacy, but Grant met with Nathaniel Lyon and Frank Blair, who were determined to hold the city—and especially its arsenal—for the union. When union men hauled down the Confederate flag from a building at Fifth and Pine, Grant was on hand.
After expressing his support, Grant “stepped on a car.” (The horse-drawn kind.) A young man boarded flushed with indignation, and began to tell Grant how outrageous it was that the flag had been pulled down: “Where I came from if a man dares to say a word in favor of the union we hang him.”
Grant replied, “After all, we are not so intolerant in St. Louis as we might be; I have not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one; there are plenty of them who ought to be, however.”
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This took the wind out of the rebel’s sails. As Grant put it, “He was so crestfallen that I believe if I had ordered him to leave the car he would have gone quietly out, saying to himself: ‘More Yankee oppression.’”
A minor point of interest about this anecdote, from Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” is that it shows that Grant considered himself a St. Louisan. Though he was living in Galena, Illinois, at the time, he still had ties to St. Louis.
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“Did you know Ulysses S. Grant was associated with the St. Louis area for over 40 years?” asks Pamela Sanfilippo. “Most people know of him as the General who won the Civil War for the Union, or as President of the United States, but his St. Louis ties were more personal.”
Sanfilippo will talk about those ties in a slide lecture sponsored by the Historical Society of University City and the . It will be at 7 p.m. May 22 at the library, 6701 Delmar Blvd.
The talk is entitled “Ulysses and Julia Grant and the Importance of Family.”
Sanfilippo is Park Historian at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, historically known as White Haven, the family home of Julia Dent, who became Grant’s wife.