DV Journal

Watch out for unintended consequences. They’ll get you every time.

It happened 160 years ago when a simple act of courtesy set in motion a chain of events that wound up taking a famous American’s life.

Really.

When you hear “Ulysses S. Grant,” what comes to mind? The more scholarly-minded probably think, “Victor at Appomattox” or “18th President of the United States.” Big drunk, and even bigger cigar smoker, are top answers, too.

Yes, the old Yankee could drink to excess. Though in fairness, he only drank when he was lonely, depressed, and stuck with too much time on his hands. Whenever that happened they sent for Mrs. Grant and the boozing stopped.

As for his love of stogies, he was history’s original Cigar Aficionado. Here’s how it began.

For the first half of his life, Grant smoked something different. A woman who had been a slave on the farm he worked outside St. Louis later recalled, “He smoked a pipe, which his wife threw away whenever she could find it. She detested the pipe … At that time he chewed tobacco excessively also.”

Fast forward to Winter 1862. Grant cooked up a bold plan for a combined army-naval assault on the Confederate strongholds of Forts Henry and Donelson. They protected the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, the gateway to Nashville.

The brass in Washington green-lighted the operation. Fort Henry easily fell after a naval bombardment on February 6. Most of its men retreated a dozen miles to the other fort.

Donelson was a different story. Bigger and stronger with more defenders, it was a tougher nut to crack.

The naval flotilla tried again on February 14, but the gunboats were pushed back. Their commander, Flag Officer Andrew Foote, was seriously wounded in his foot. (Foote’s foot; how’s that for irony?)

The next day Foote asked Grant to confer with him on his flagship as he recovered. Foote offered the general a cigar, which Grant lit up as he rode back to headquarters. Years later, Grant described what came next.

“I was met by a staff officer, who announced the enemy was making a vigorous attack. I galloped forward and while riding among the troops giving directions for repelling the assault, I carried the cigar in my hand. It had gone out, but it seems I continued to hold it between my fingers throughout the battle.”

The Yankees repulsed the Confederates and the next morning the Rebels surrendered.

Capturing Fort Donelson was a big deal. Grant had won the Union’s first major victory, also becoming the first general since Washington to capture an entire enemy army. People celebrated across the North. The Chicago Tribune said the Windy City “reeled mad with joy.”

But amid the elation there was a major error. As Grant himself explained, “In the account published in the papers I was represented as smoking a cigar in the midst of the conflict; and many persons, no doubt thinking tobacco was my chief solace, sent me boxes of the choicest brands. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”

Think about that: 10,000 cigars! They came with notes of appreciation. One said, “You keep winning victories and I’ll keep sending cigars.”

Grant “re-gifted” them on a wholesale basis. But he couldn’t keep pace with the deluge. A practical man, he eventually decided, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Grant put away his pipe explaining, “I naturally smoked more (cigars) than I would have under ordinary circumstances, and have done so ever since.”

That was an understatement. From then on, soldiers rarely saw Grant without a cigar clamped in his mouth. It reached the point where he was smoking 20 stogies every day (almost one per hour). When the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg fell the following year Grant was smoking a cigar as he rode off to accept its surrender.

Ironically, as word of his cigar addiction spread, Grant took pains to avoid being photographed while smoking. In fact, only one such image is known to exist.

Meanwhile, the gift boxes kept coming. Grant told a fellow general, “There is one good thing about being the Commanding General. You get the best cigars.”

And yet, some people had problems with Grant’s habit. Consider the open letter to him in a Massachusetts newspaper: “We pray you to abandon your cigar on behalf of young America … Our boys, General! What shall we do with these expanding millions? We had a sufficiency of these young volcanoes before, but your example, running like wildfire, has kindled ten thousand more.”

Still, by the time Grant ran for president in 1868 his supporters sang a popular campaign song called, “A’smokin’ My Old Cigar.” (They just don’t write ditties like that anymore.)

All that puffing eventually took its toll. And the illness it produced brought out the best in Grant as a man.

After leaving the White House in 1877, Grant was swindled out of his life savings by fraudulent investors. It left him flat broke.

Just when things couldn’t get worse for the aging general and ex-president, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Thousands upon thousands of cigars had finally caught up with him.

Terminally ill and nearly destitute, there was nothing he could leave his wife. (That was decades before former presidents received a pension.) But Grant had one last thing of value.

Battling increasingly intense pain, he set about writing “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,” finishing it just days before his death at age 62 in 1885. It sold more than 300,000 copies, earning nearly half a million dollars and guaranteeing his widow, Julia, would spend the rest of her life in comfort.

Thus ended the journey that had begun 23 years earlier with the innocent question, “Care for a cigar, general?”

Please follow DVJournal on social media: Twitter@DVJournal or Facebook.com/DelawareValleyJournal

Every so often, history offers a story that is so improbable there is no way it could be true. Yet once in the proverbial blue moon, a tale defies the odds and turns out to have really happened.

This story isn’t one of them.

It was, in fact, a prank that people accepted as fact for over a century. But the story behind the story is enjoyable, and the whole bizarre incident is a hoot and a half, so here goes.

Doctors got a big surprise when they opened the November 7, 1874, edition of “The American Medical Weekly.” A headline breathlessly announced, “ATTENTION GYNECOLOGISTS! — NOTES FROM THE DIARY OF A FIELD AND HOSPITAL SURGEON, C.S.A.” It was written by a former Confederate army doctor named L.G. Capers.

He was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1834, practiced as a ship physician at sea, and served in the Confederate medical service. His article described an incident 11 years earlier during the Battle of Raymond, Miss. 

As Capers recalled, “I beheld a noble, gallant young friend staggering closer, and then fall to the earth. In the same moment, a piercing scream from the house reached my ear!” The doctor said he examined the wound and found a minie ball (the war’s misnamed and widely used cone-shaped bullet) had struck the shinbone, ricocheted upward, and exited the body via the soldier’s private parts. Then things got strange.

Capers continued, “Scarcely had I finished dressing the wounds of this poor fellow when the estimable matron came running to me in the greatest distress, begging me to go to one of her daughters who, she informed me, had been badly wounded a few minutes before.”

The young woman had also been hit in her private area. “Believing there was little or no hope of her recovery, I had only time to prescribe an anodyne when our army fell back.” 

Six months later, the army returned and, according to the good doctor, he discovered the patient was pregnant. “A short time later, I delivered this same young lady of a fine boy, weighing eight pounds.”

As if all this hadn’t been enough, the story ended with a weird twist. “About three weeks from the date of this remarkable birth, I was called to see the child, the grandmother insisting there was ‘something wrong.’” 

Capers said he examined the infant and immediately performed surgery. He “extracted a minie ball, mashed and battered as if it had met in its flight some hard, unyielding substance.”

Bottom line: The minie ball that had wounded the soldier carried some of his male essences as it exited his body and slammed into the young woman’s womb. The result was known from then on as the Minie Ball Pregnancy.

I will spare you the medical mumbo jumbo but suffice it to say it is physically impossible for conception to occur this way. Which makes it all the stranger that men of science perpetuated the absurdity.

The highly respected British medical journal The Lancet reprinted parts of the original article. In 1896, its piece was cited as a footnote in a book called “Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine.” The tale later gained fresh traction in an influential 1959 article in the New York State Journal of Medicine. From then on, it was cited as a “documented case” and was mentioned in everything from American Heritage magazine to the popular Dear Abby column.

Yet it never happened.

A few weeks after the publication of the original 1874 article that started it all, the editors acknowledged in a subsequent edition that the whole thing had been in jest. “Dr. L.G. Capers, of Vicksburg, Miss., disclaims responsibility for the truth of that remarkable case of impregnation by a minie ball, as reported in … this Journal. He tells the story as it was told to him. He does not say it is untrue but is disposed to appositely remember the truth of the old adage, that ‘accidents may happen in the best-regulated families.’ The joke is, that the doctor reported the case without any signature.”

You saw it: It was all a joke.

But to this very day, some Civil War buffs adamantly insist the Minie Ball Pregnancy actually happened.

It’s a shame it didn’t. If it had, the baby indeed would have been the world’s only “son of a gun.”

Please follow DVJournal on social media: Twitter@DVJournal or Facebook.com/DelawareValleyJournal

The Yankee soldier stares at us with a hard glint in his eyes. Wiry and weathered, he’s ready for action. No name, no date, no unit. Just a young man whose face shows the strain of war.

What makes this photo remarkable is the “971” in faded red ink in the lower-left corner, two empty slots at the top and bottom, and “Alexandria, VA” in period handwriting.

They indicate the Civil War image came from the post office’s Dead Letter Office (DLO).

Postal workers stayed incredibly busy from 1861 to 1865. Some 2.5 million men served in the Union army alone. Many wrote letters home. And the folks there wrote back. Meaning tens of thousands of pieces moved through the mail every day.

But there were logistical headaches. Some soldiers were barely literate. Others had sloppy handwriting. They didn’t always affix adequate postage. And many letters were improperly addressed. By the time some letters reached their destination, they were so badly marked up by various postmasters they looked like they had come through combat themselves.

Whenever one couldn’t be delivered, it wound up in the DLO in Washington. Operating since 1825, for much of the 19th century it was, along with the Pension Bureau and Patent Office, a “must-see” stop for D.C. tourists. It was so popular, it even had a small museum displaying oddities discovered inside letters whose owners were never located. Such as a loaded pistol and a human skull.

By war’s end, some 4.5 million pieces of mail had piled up in the DLO. Special clerks examined each one for clues about the addressee that local postmasters had missed. When external examination failed, clerks had authority under a law passed by Congress to open an envelope to see if the letter contained hints about the recipient’s identity. Those clerks were often women and ordained ministers since it was believed they were more trustworthy when handling sensitive data. They were so skilled at their work, more than 40 percent of DLO letters were eventually delivered.

Soldiers’ letters sometimes contained photos meant for mothers, wives, sweethearts, and friends. They were saved and the pictures added to the DLO’s mini-museum.

Each soldier’s photo was numbered in red ink and attached with two brass clips to a cardboard display panel. Four rows containing nine pictures each, or 36 per page. It is estimated there were somewhere been 5,000 and 7,500 images in all.

Visitors scanned the pages. If they came upon someone they knew, they got the letter.

The display was such a hit, a special wooden case was built to hold the photo panels. Emotions often bubbled to the surface during the viewing; women frequently sobbed while looking for a lost loved one’s face.

The photos were even taken to world fairs where tens of thousands of attendees saw them. Consider the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition in Omaha, Neb., where a woman spotted an image of her father taken 35 years earlier. (That letter was returned to the elderly veteran in Indiana.)

In 1902, another aging veteran claimed the letter he had mailed exactly 40 years earlier!

Veterans’ organizations, such as the Grand Army of the Republic (similar to today’s VFW and American Legion), and newspaper and magazine feature stories were also used to publicize the effort.

A newspaper article reported that in all, some 2,000 letters were eventually delivered thanks to the photos.

But thousands more went unclaimed. When the post office moved into its new Washington building in 1911 (now a Trump hotel, by the way), the DLO went with it. Its little museum, however, didn’t. With the Civil War becoming a distant memory, fewer people asked to see the pictures. The display was put in storage. It was decided to sell the images in the 1940s. (Nobody knows what happened to the letters that inspired the display. They seem to have simply vanished over the decades.)

One group of 300 DLO photos wound up in a New York bookseller’s hands after World War II. They were later sold to the George Eastman Museum. A second batch was acquired by a Sons of Union Veterans commander. Those images were eventually auctioned off in the 1980s.

Where did the Dead Letter Office photos originate? We’ll never know. The identity of the soldiers shown in them, or who they intended to receive their photographs, went to the grave with them. Maybe that’s why they glare at us so unhappily nearly 160 years later. In their own small way, their pictures were also a casualty of that saddest of all wars.

Please follow DVJournal on social media: Twitter@DVJournal or Facebook.com/DelawareValleyJournal