Reservations are required for the program will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission, which includes a lunch, is $70 for adults and $50 for members. Register online: heritage.center/events/civil-war-symposium.
Epiphany launched Grant portrayer’s career
It was September of 2008 and the 145th anniversary of Civil War Battle at Chickamauga Creek was being observed near the Tennessee-Georgia line.
Just off the bus from his home near Memphis and freshly immersed in the gathering’s atmosphere, Curt Fields asked a man of Abraham Lincoln’s considerable stature and who was portraying the president to pose for a photo with him.
“I can’t remember when I wasn’t passionate about the Civil War,” Fields said.
But “when Lincoln put his arm around my shoulder,” Fields said, “something really strange happened.”
What he’d been taught as a child, read more of as an adult and grew to feel as he walked the grounds of battlefields that came to life during re-enactments – “all of this,” he said – led to a moment of epiphany.
At 5-foot-8, Fields, who had long walked around with the requisite dimensions, considered a new possibility: “If I were to grow a beard, could I look like Ulysses S. Grant?”
Two months and no shaves later, he put on an off-the-rack Union uniform and stood before a just-opened door in the presence of two Civil War re-enactor friends.
Their conclusion was plain as the hair on Fields’ face.
“They said I could do it.”
And an ongoing adventure began.
Discovery
For the next year and two months, Fields said he learned a lesson in “the difference between reading and studying” as he began amassing the storehouse of knowledge needed to portray in sufficient detail – and without the aid of notes – the only person in American military history to hold the same rank as George Washington.
He describes the meticulous process with this approximation: “You walk through a muddy field and there are diamonds here and there.”
Another challenge soon arose: to find his character’s voice.
Grant’s was described as a low baritone, he said, what one person described as “the most melodious voice I’ve ever heard.”
Fields is himself baritone and used history and a little legwork in tracking down the general’s. Its geographic and cultural influence is the Mason-Dixon Line, which runs along the Ohio River past Point Pleasant, where Grant was born, to Georgetown, where he grew up.
It was also, of course, the nation’s great political divide.
“Richmond is just a little bit farther south than where Grant grew up,” Fields said, and the Georgetown area “was founded by people from Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee,” many relocating because they did not want to live in a slave state.
Tellingly, in decade of visits to the U.S. Grant Homestead Association in Georgetown, where he is the official voice of Grant, “I haven’t noticed any accents,” Fields said.
And while he felt reassured sure when a resident of the Brown County Historical Society remarked, “I’ve got to tell you, you sound just like I always thought Ulysses was sound,” Fields’ adds this: “If you do your man well – if you know your man and you put forth your man with compassion and sincerity – after the first few sentences, people will forget about the accent.”
To galvanize or not to galvanize?
Although Georgia’s Andersonville Prison is the war’s most infamous prison, Fields says the Union’s Elmira Prison in New York just north of the Pennsylvania border “was every bit as bad,” Fields said. “All of them were hell.”
Knowing this and needing to address a troop shortage to address conflicts with Native American out West, the Union Army offered to release Confederates who pledge loyalty to the Union and agreed to serve.
Those who did were ridiculed as “galvanized” Yankees because underneath their blue uniforms they remained rebels. The term comes from the process of galvanizing metal, which wraps a zinc outer coating that obscures the metal at its heart.
In re-enacting, galvanizing has a more mundane and practical meaning: to show up to battlefields with both Confederate and Yankee uniforms in tow so that that the battle can have balanced numbers.
For the Confederate officer he would portray should a competing Ulysses Grants show up, Fields had chosen “The Stonewall (Jackson) of the West,’ Irish immigrant Patrick Cleburne.
“He’s quite the character,” Fields said.
Cleburne had served in the British Army before emigrating to Arkansas and fought at Shiloh, Richmond, Ky., Murfreesboro and Chickamauga, being wounded multiple times. The Battlefield Trust reports that while calling slavery “a continuous embarrassment and in some respects an insidious weakness,” he proposed that the South strengthen its flagging ranks later in the war by going beyond what North was doing: arming slaves to fight with the guarantee that they would be granted their freedom at war’s end.
Although Cleburne’s proposal was rejected by the powers-that-be, he continued to advocate for it until Nov. 30, 1864, when he was one of six generals killed at the Battle of Franklin.
Ultimately, Fields decided not to portray Cleburne not because he is against galvanizing but for his own very practical reason: “I don’t have enough hours in the day” to do justice to two such characters without diminishing both.
His takes on Grant
Fields has, of course, learned a great deal about Grant and his character.
As a person, he was a devoted – almost to distraction – father who wrestled in army tents with the two Grant sons during their rare wartime visits.
He was also “slow to anger,” (though when he did, “get out of the way”) and held his other emotions in control, making him a good card player and well suited to endure the brutalities of war.
“He was seen to cry when he heard James McPherson was killed in Atlanta,” said Fields, (and) “openly wept at Lincoln’s funeral in the White House.”
Fields volunteers that Grant “could not physiologically handle alcohol” and “drank to kill the pain of loneliness” of separation from wife Julia in his postings after West Point. But he argues that in a time of liberal drinking Grant’s drunkenness was blown out of proportion by “a very jealous officer corps” constantly competing for plum assignments.
As general
Fields says that Grant’s fight at war’s end with Robert E. Lee unjustly overshadows his earlier achievements in the Western theater, naming battles at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson are particularly under appreciated. The first was “a sword in the belly of the Confederacy” and the second “a dagger in its heart” from which it never regained its balance.
The battles ultimately led to the capture of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, “the only railroad in the Southern United States that connected the Mississippi (River) and the Atlantic.”
And Fields says Grant rose like a man with “a rocket strapped to his backside.”
“In 33 months, he went from an unknown colonel of volunteers to the only Lt. Gen in the entire U.S. Army, commanding almost a million men.”
By the time Lincoln tapped him to head army in March 1864, Grant had forced the surrender of two armies – one 15,000 men, another of 30,000 men and 13 months later accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, which Fields will address on March 8 when he shares the diamonds he’s discovered while walking so many muddied fields.
Relative of Robert E. Lee prefers bio over battles
Thomas Lee Jessee’s middle name was plucked like a leaf from the same family tree as the renowned Confederate general he has long portrayed. Jessee’ father and brother traced the branches of that tree and found the general’s great uncle.
While he says it with a laugh, Jessee continues to be surprised at how many people who seem to think Robert E. “lived a very short life,” their awareness of him being limited to the years 1861-65.
Because of that, Jessee said, “I like to talk about his life instead of the war.”
Those who know a smidgen of Lee’s story know him to be a son of Harry “Light Horse” Lee, whose nickname echoes the kind of fast-moving cavalry unit he heroically served during the war for American independence.
But even those who don’t know “Light Horse” may know the words “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” which he spoke at George Washington’s funeral.
Lee’s father had also distinguished himself as Ulysses S. Grant would a generation later — as a total business failure.
By the time of Robert E.’s birth in 1807, “he was essentially bankrupt,” Jessee said, and had moved with his second wife and children to Alexandria, Va., to be close to the Lee, Custis and Washington families. The general’s future father-in-law, George Washington Custis, was an owner of three plantations, including Arlington, and one of the wealthiest men in the Commonwealth.
Custis “considered himself the keeper of George Washington’s memory,” Jessee said, and held parties every Feb. 22 and July 4 to celebrate Washington and the nation’s birthdays on the grounds of Arlington House and beneath a Washington family tent.
Eleven or 12 when his father died, the future general felt a sense of belonging under that tent and accepted as required reading George Washington’s book about being a gentleman.
After his boyhood education, he followed Washington’s career path, which proved to be a path of convenience for a boy whose family lacked the money to send him to college.
Just as his older brother, Sydney Smith Lee, attended the Naval Academy and served in the Confederate Navy, Robert E. was nominated to West Point, where he met Jefferson Davis, future Southern Generals Albert Sidney Johnson and future Union general George Meade, who would be a lifelong friend.
Lee excelled in math and studied engineering at West Point, at that time the nation’s best place engineering school. Finishing second in his class, he was permitted to choose his area of service, which was the engineering corps. That education and years of army experience would affect the course of the Civil War.
“He could look at terrain with the eye of an engineer and determine ‘this is the best place for this, this is the best place for that,’” Jessee said.
But upon graduation he was for a time stymied in the battle for woman he wished to marry, Mary Anna Custis, the daughter of previously mentioned and wealthy George Washington Custis.
“She said ‘yes,’ and her mother approved it,” Jessee said, but her father worried that “a second lieutenant making what we would consider nothing could in the long run please a woman who had been denied nothing during her childhood.
To Lee’s relief, daughter and mother won the day and a long, happy marriage began.
Jessee said that for Lee and other later Civil War generals, the Mexican War served as a rehearsal dinner. In it, Lee served on the staff of commanding General Winfield Scott with his future Union rival George McLellan and G.T. Beauregard, who would be at the battle of Fort Sumter that opened the Civil War.
Those combined experiences at West Point and in Mexico meant Lee knew – as many with his background did – the generals he faced on Civil War Battlefield. And he went into battle with the added advantage of being a superior engineer to orchestrate his battlements.
Proof was in the poundings
“By May of 1863, he had fought five Union commanders and bested every one of them,” Jessee said. After, he headed north, to strike panic into a Union army he had heard was demoralized.
He did so giving his generals specific instructions to avoid major engagements with the enemy while thousands of Confederate units that overwhelm any one path traveled alternate routes.
The battle at Gettysburg “was not supposed to happen,” Jessee said, and when Lee questioned Gen. Henry Heth on his failure to avoid an engagement, Heth told him circumstances prevented it.
Jessee’s judgment was that Lee’s fateful decision to attack the Union’s center up a long hill on the final day of battle was one countless “military calculations” Lee made during the war, one made that day with the an eye to reserve a path of retreat if things went sideways and an unwillingness to undertake a major realignment of his units while Union generals watched from higher ground.
Lee’s final campaigns were, of course, against Grant and will be discussed at the seminar.
Although he did follow reports of Grant’s actions in the newspapers, he didn’t remember a single meeting he had had with him and had only the assessment Confederate Gen. Longstreet, who had attended Grant’s wedding: “The first chance he has, he will hit you as hard as he can, and he will not stop.”
After the war, Grant and Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman stood up for Lee and struck a death blow to plans to prosecute him for treason despite the parole Granted to all the Confederates at Appomattox.
Said Jessee: “The treason indictment was put on hold and just went away.”