Mississippi State gets Grant's presidential library

John Marszalek shows off some of the treasures from the Grant archives now on display in the library.

The first president of Mississippi State University – back when it was known as Mississippi A & M – was Stephen D. Lee, a famous Confederate general. Now the university is home to the papers of the most famous general on the other side of the Civil War – Ulysses S. Grant. MPB’s Cari Gervin visited Starkville to get the story.

I’m standing here in the basement of the Mitchell Memorial Library, in the Congressional and Political Research Center. I’m surrounded by 90 file cabinets, 90 of the big five-, six-drawer stacking metal file cabinets. All of these – all of these – are filled with papers, documents, pictures, books – everything relating to the life of Ulysses S. Grant.

“I joke about this, but it’s true – every time I open a file drawer, I find some new treasure.”

That’s John Marszalek. He’s a professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State, and he knows a LOT about Grant. Marszalek has spent most of his career writing about General William Sherman – you know, that guy who burned down Atlanta during the Civil War. Sherman was Grant’s best friend, so over the years Marszalek became kind of a Grant scholar too, ending up as the executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association.

And it is because of that association that these 90 file cabinets are now in this basement room at Mississippi State. Here’s John Marszalek again:

“Now the average person might open a file drawer and say, that’s just a bunch a paper. But I find some wonderful letter from Grant, or to Grant, or I find – for example, the other day we found a replica of a death mask of Grant. In the nineteenth century they did these things, they would put plaster on a dead person’s face.”

The Grant papers – all 10,000 linear feet of them – had been housed at Southern Illinois University since the 1960s, when Professor John Simon was the leading Grant scholar of his day. But after Southern Illinois began investigating sexual harassment allegations against Simon, the Grant Association decided to take its papers elsewhere. Simon died last summer before the legal wrangling ended. And in January, the file cabinets rolled off a truck and onto the campus of Mississippi State.

In case you’ve forgotten your high school history, Ulysses S. Grant was the eighteenth president of the United States. But before he was president, he was the top Union general in the Civil War. His leadership won the battle of Vicksburg, considered by scholars to be one of the greatest military campaigns of all time. It also did a lot of damage.

So, is it a big deal for a Mississippi school to have his presidential library? Mark Keenum, the president of Mississippi State, says no.

“There’s probably not been another state in the union that had more to do with the career of Ulysses S. Grant, in propelling him in his success, than the state of Mississippi.”

Keenum says that getting the collection puts Mississippi State in line with schools like Virginia, which houses Thomas Jefferson’s papers, and Princeton, which has Woodrow Wilson’s library. More importantly, he says:

“To have papers from the military campaigns that he conducted in this state and to be able to study those and to see how he was thinking and to see his actual handwriting when he was writing notes and orders to his officers during the battle of the siege of Vicksburg – I mean, his activities here, in this state, it’s part of our history.”

And the opportunity to study that history has everyone excited. Frances Coleman is the Dean of Libraries at Mississippi State. She says that in her twenty years at the library she hasn’t seen an acquisition quite this big and exciting. But Coleman says the best part will be making sure the public has access to the Grant papers.

“Previously, Dr. Simon, who was the executive director and was the researcher for the collection, his role was to write about Grant. Dr. Marszalek will be doing that here, but we’ll be working with him to open to the papers. And that has not been done before.”

The library staff is already working on a website for the collection. Eventually everything in those 90 file cabinets – letters, files and indexes – will be digitized and easily accessible to scholars around the world.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin in Oxford.