You'll find it just over the Mississippi River, a short hike east of Dubuque. Because of the rolling hills all around, when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels somehow like a discovery--and it will be, a 19th century gem of a town where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, the whole of it, is a museum.
The city will happily point out that nine Civil War generals once called the place home. Not bad for a small town. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but one name you'll recognize, the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, although his presidency may well be less memorable than his command of the entire Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant took Lee's sword at Appomattox, and then, after a fashion, boldly and respectfully gave it back.
As a General he was indefatigable, determined as a strategist, relentlessly disciplined. Yet, when warfare ceased, he championed an impossibly charitable forgiveness that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He was as determined in the horrors of war as he was in the pursuit of peace. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.
Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, Ulysses S. Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if Grant would sit down and record his memories. He told Twain that idea was silly, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. A few published essays brought him some significant rewards, Twain made offers Grant couldn't refuse, and number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his legacy.
Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not."
Ron Chernow in his massively detailed Grant biography, American Ulysses, spends significant time refuting the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish up, even though he was dying.
But I think you need only to read a letter Grant wrote the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer to be killed during the Civil War. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he was thrown into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, one of Grant's close friends.
Our nation grieves as one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander.
And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."
That's not just lyrical style, it's all heart.
None other than Frederick Douglas, perhaps the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of the 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house."
If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was hard-nosed general who dallied too close to a bottle, and a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, drop by Galena sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit his house, spend an hour or two at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.
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