Join us for The Friends of Grant Cottage Annual Meeting on Sunday, March 31st at 2pm. Learn about the accomplishments of the Friends over the last 30 years and enjoy a program titled, “Ulysses S. Grant and the 1864 Campaign in History and Memory” presented by Dr. Andre Fleche. The event is open to the public and followed by the official business meeting. Only members may participate in board elections. The meeting will be held in the Saratoga Spa State Park Administration Building, 19 Roosevelt Drive (Gideon Putnam Room).
In the spring of 1864, one hundred and fifty-five years ago this May, General Ulysses S. Grant opened his famed Overland Campaign. The unprecedentedly intense fighting, which lasted for the rest of the year, began in the Wilderness of central Virginia and ended in the siege trenches outside Richmond and Petersburg. The events of 1864 have been counted among Grant’s most celebrated but also most controversial accomplishments. On the one hand, the slow progress made by the Union armies went a long way toward ensuring the capture of Richmond, the destruction of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and the end of the war. On the other hand, the tragically high casualties caused some observers to question Grant’s generalship and label him a clumsy “butcher.” Dr. Andre Fleche will explore the ways in which the 1864 campaigns shaped Grant’s historical reputation by paying special attention to the difference between the “history” and “memory” of the events in question.
Dr. Fleche is an associate professor of history at Castleton University. His first book, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, received the Southern Historical Association’s James A. Rowley award in 2013.
