Louisville’s Lost National Holiday: Sectional Reconciliation and the Ulysses S. Grant 1885 Birthday Celebration

Louisville' s Lost National Holiday Sectional Reconciliation and tbe Ulysses S.Grant 1885 Birthday Celebration Robert B. Symon,Jr. n April 27,1885, the city of Louisville led the nation in a celebra don of the birth of the n, ition's eighteenth president, Ulysses S. Grant. At the time, Grant, who had been born not far upriver at Point Pleasant, Ohio, had once lived briefly in Covington, Kentucky, and who had left office less than a decade earlier in 1877,lay dying from 1 , cancer. A clamor of public interest surrounded the former Union general s health. The Louisville event did not arise from a national effort. Instead, a group of ten Louisville civic and business leaders gathered on April 20 L 0 and decided that the city should have a formal town meeting to recognize Grant' s sixtythird birthday. Cities across the nation followed the initiative of Louisville and held similar events on the same day, thus placing Louisville in the nation·al spotlight. As the festivities of April 27 became national in scope, the newspaper from Louisville' s chief rival, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, praised its sister city tor its initiative and noted that it was " undoubtedly the beginning of a new anniversary day in our annals, and is ,« , : i-' ff destined to become popular like the 22''' of February AN»' * A or 'Washington Day,' as it has been happily styled." 1 A . .,· e 4/ IN lit The event, however, did not become another 4 . Washington's birthday and the celebration has been 1, irgely excluded from the historical record of both ':. the nition and Louisville. Indeed, Louisville's bUS- 11 ness leaders in the late nincteenth century advocated G«--2 , = the perception that the city' s interests had always been Ulysses S.Grant ( 18221885 ). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER aligned with the South. Local histories of the city published after the war omitted anything that could be construed as demonstrating an association with the North. In keeping with the histories of the postwar South published in the early twentieth century by academic historians such as William A. Dunning and E. Merton Coulter, who presented harsh portraits of Reconstruction ( and, for Kentucky, " readjustment") and its effects on southern states, local hist 4JBS(] 14IPTION. 5, 01 tork : E. B . T REAT & CO ..Pt· 19], Ii:1 Il Iits BA,/ NMONE.MD.: L.T.I'A]EER* CO. ST. LOUl., Mo.: I. 8 = RD. LOUZBVTLEKr.:( KO. B. F.. 21 ....'. ....... .' i...... ./ 0..'. 1,© yl?. .... I. .. 1,/ m; 1 WILSON. 3/: Al „ 12,», m : J. B.SU'MON, LLUUSM,TR&* s: J. f.F/ L21 1.. ntispiece,Edward Alfred Pollard, The Lost Cause: A w Southern History ofthe War ofthe Confederates ew York: E. B.Treat, 1866). THEFILSON HISTORICALSOCIETY vatives, many of them former Confederates who wished to maintain the antebellum traditions, social customs, and economy ( and known widely as Bourbons"), controlled much of the state' s party and legislative apparatus as well as its political conventions. In contrast, Watterson led a group known as " New Departure Democrats" who advocated southern industrial progress and unity with the nation as a whole. FALL 2008 41 LOUISVILLE' S LOST NATIONAL HOLIDAY Though an exConfederate , Watterson argued that the best interest of the state resided in a political alliance between the northern and southern branches of the Democratic Party and advocated compromise with moderate Republicans. Watterson maintained that the South had to accept Portrait of Henry Watterson (1840-1921) by Ferdinand Graham Walker,c. 19001921 . THEFILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY the results of the war, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, view itself as part of a united nation, and act accordingly. Watterson biographer Daniel S. Margolies has summed up the pragmatism in the Democratic newspaperman's approach by presenting the editor's argument that " the reforming elements of the New South merely sought an innovative way to regain the old rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Indeed,Watterson' s position reflected a dismissal of the nostalgia of the Lost Cause and accepted not only the finality of the war,but also the inevitable triumph of the industrial age. The future of the South, perhaps the only future for the South, involved embracing the emerging technology. A reconciliation...