TWO-FRONT WAR
From his early days at the U.S. Military Academy, Ulysses S. Grant placed Charles Ferguson Smith in elite company. “I regarded General [Winfield] Scott and Captain C.F. Smith…as the two men most to be envied in the nation,” Grant would write in his Personal Memoirs. “I retained a high regard for both up to the day of their death.”
Grant graduated in West Point’s Class of 1843, the same year Smith—15 years his senior—completed his term as the academy’s commandant of cadets. The two served together during the Mexican War, but their military careers soon headed in abruptly different directions. By the out-break of the Civil War, Smith had become one of the U.S. Army’s most celebrated officers. Grant, meanwhile, having left the service in disgrace in July 1854, was working at his father’s tanning business in Galena, Ill.
Although the Civil War provided the two a welcome reunion in the Western Theater, it would prove brief and painful. Smith died in April 1862 due to complications from a freak injury suffered while he was jumping into a boat in Savannah, Tenn. Grant, of course, eventually became the Union Army’s top general and finally engineered Northern victory in 1865. How different the outcome would have been had Smith survived his wound is one of the war’s many intriguing unknowns.
In the late summer of
