Gordon Granger

• 1. Introduction

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  Gordon Granger was born on the 6th of November 1821, in Joy, Wayne County, New York, and by the end of his life he had shaped two of the most consequential moments in American history. One of those moments unfolded on a battlefield in Georgia, where a general acting without orders may have saved an entire Union army from destruction. The other happened nine days after the Civil War's last embers were dying, in a port city in Texas, when Granger read aloud a proclamation that changed everything for people who had been waiting two and a half years to hear it. Who was this man, and how did a teacher from upstate New York become the officer standing at the center of both a military rescue and the birth of Juneteenth?

• 2. From Joy to West Point

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  Granger's early years were marked by loss. His mother died on the 17th of April 1825, just one month after giving birth to a daughter, leaving him one of three children in the family. His father remarried in November 1826, to Sara Emery, and the two went on to have ten more children. Granger spent his formative years not with his father but with his paternal grandparents, Elihu and Apema Granger, in Phelps, New York.

  Health problems emerged during his high school years and followed him for the rest of his life. Before entering the military, he worked as a teacher in North Rose, New York. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy in 1841 at age nineteen, and it was there that he met John Pope, who would later become one of his mentors.

  Granger graduated in 1845, placed thirty-fifth in a class of forty-one cadets. It was a middling finish, but it earned him a commission as a brevet second lieutenant, and the Army posted him to the Second Infantry Regiment in Detroit, Michigan. In July 1846, he transferred to the newly constituted Regiment of Mounted Riflemen at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and within months he was heading south into a war.

• 3. Fire Under Winfield Scott

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  Granger fought in Winfield Scott's army during the Mexican-American War, moving through some of the campaign's most intense engagements. He took part in the Siege of Veracruz, the Battle of Cerro Gordo, the Battle of Contreras, the Battle of Churubusco, and the Battle for Mexico City. Along the way he earned two citations for gallantry.

  In May 1847 he received his regular commission as a second lieutenant, a recognition that his performance had earned him a permanent place in the professional army rather than a temporary wartime appointment. After the fighting ended, Granger served on the western frontier, first in Oregon and then in Texas, before rising to first lieutenant in 1853.

  Those frontier years were quiet compared to what had come before, but they built the habits that would define him: a blunt discipline, an eye for terrain, and a willingness to act on his own judgment. A soldier who trusted his own read of a situation would need exactly those qualities when the next great war arrived.

• 4. Chickamauga and the Gamble Without Orders

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  When the Civil War began, Granger was on sick leave. He was briefly assigned to General George B. McClellan's staff in Ohio, then returned to the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen and was promoted to captain in May 1861. He saw action at the Battle of Dug Springs and witnessed the Union defeat at Wilson's Creek in August 1861, where he served as a staff officer to General Nathaniel Lyon and was cited for gallantry. He was made a brevet major and given command of the St. Louis Arsenal.

  By November 1861 he was a colonel of volunteers commanding the 2nd Michigan Cavalry Regiment at Benton Barracks. A Union veteran later wrote in a memoir that Granger's "military genius soon asserted itself by many severe lessons to the volunteer officers and men of this regiment," and that he had "succeeded in winning the respect of his regiment by his strict attention to all the details of making a well disciplined body of soldiers out of a mass of awkward men from every walk of life." By the 26th of March 1862 he was a brigadier general, and by the 17th of September 1862, a major general of volunteers.

  The battle that defined Granger's reputation came on the 20th of September 1863, the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga. The Union line had collapsed across most of the field. Major General George H. Thomas was making a desperate stand on Snodgrass Hill, and without anyone ordering him to move, Granger decided to march his Reserve Corps to Thomas's aid. He directed James B. Steedman to send two brigades to bolster Thomas's position. When Thomas asked whether those fresh troops could counterattack a Confederate force pressing the Union flank, Granger replied: "My men are fresh and they are just the fellows for that work. They are raw troops and don't know any better than to charge up there."

  The intervention held the line until nightfall. It allowed Federal forces to withdraw in good order rather than be swept from the field. In his after-action report, Granger wrote that he had acted because he was "well convinced, judging from the sound of battle, that the enemy were pushing him, and fearing that would not be able to resist their combined attack." Thomas earned the sobriquet "Rock of Chickamauga" for that stand; the reserve general who marched without orders to make it possible earned his own promotion and the command of the newly formed IV Corps.

• 5. Missionary Ridge and Mobile Bay

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  Under Granger's command, the IV Corps played a pivotal role at the Battle of Chattanooga. Two of the corps' divisions, those led by Thomas J. Wood and Philip Sheridan, were positioned in the middle of four divisions ordered to assault the Confederate center on Missionary Ridge. The original instruction was only to seize the rifle-pits at the ridge's base. Granger's men kept climbing after that limited objective was taken, pushing up the steep slope with the other two divisions just slightly behind, and they routed the Confederates from the crest. The breakthrough, combined with Hooker's assault to the right, forced General Braxton Bragg's army to retreat in disorder.

  Despite those battlefield successes, Granger's relationship with Ulysses S. Grant had curdled. Grant disliked Granger in part because Granger resisted a plea from General Phil Sheridan to pursue the retreating Confederate army after Chattanooga. That resistance blocked Granger from gaining more prominent assignments in either the Western or Eastern Theater. It was General E. R. S. Canby, acting over Grant's objections, who offered Granger a command in the Department of the Gulf.

  In that role, Granger led the land forces that captured Forts Gaines and Morgan during Admiral David Farragut's naval operations in the Gulf of Mexico, at the Battle of Mobile Bay. He then commanded the XIII Corps at the Battle of Fort Blakeley, which led to the fall of the city of Mobile, Alabama, one of the Confederacy's last major ports.

• 6. Galveston and General Order No. 3

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  Granger arrived in Texas on the 10th of June 1865, nine days after the war's formal end, taking command of the District of Texas. On the 19th of June 1865, in the city of Galveston, one of his first acts was to post General Order No. 3. The order opened: "The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection therefore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer."

  The proclamation itself had existed since the 1st of January 1863, when Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took legal effect. Texas had seen little Union military presence during the war, and so enforcement had been absent. Granger's order was not new law; it was the moment the law finally arrived. The reaction among the freed population was immediate: joyous demonstrations broke out, and the date became the origin of the annual Juneteenth celebration. Since 2021, the 19th of June has been commemorated as a federal holiday.

  Granger's conduct in Texas extended beyond that single proclamation. He declared all Confederate laws null, arranged the parole of Confederate soldiers, and directed that any cotton held as public property be turned over to the U.S. Army. He also advised the newly freed Black population not to congregate near towns and military posts without employment. He suggested they remain on their plantations temporarily, signing labor agreements with their former owners until the Freedmen's Bureau could establish itself. Granger was replaced in his Texas command on the 6th of August 1865 by General Horatio Wright.

• 7. Later Years and the Grant Feud

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  After Texas, Granger commanded the Department of Kentucky from the 12th of August 1865 to the 15th of January 1866. The war had stripped away his wartime rank, and he spent his postbellum years navigating a peacetime army in which his old enemy, Ulysses S. Grant, held increasing power.

  Granger's relationship with President Andrew Johnson, which he had cultivated when Johnson was Tennessee's military governor, became a political liability as Grant aligned with the Radical Republicans. In September 1866, Granger joined George Armstrong Custer in organizing a "soldiers' convention" in Cleveland in support of Johnson's administration. Grant, already suspicious, believed Granger was using his Johnson connection to avoid "tedious routine duties." On the 2nd of May 1866, Granger had been elected a First Class Companion of the New York Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, a prestigious society for Union officers.

  In July 1866, Granger was assigned as colonel to the reconstituted 25th Infantry Regiment, though he spent much of that period in New York City lobbying Johnson for appointments rather than reporting to his unit. He returned to duty on the 1st of September 1867. Reassigned as colonel of the 15th Infantry Regiment on the 15th of December 1870, he commanded the District of New Mexico from the 29th of April 1871 to the 1st of June 1873.

  During that New Mexico command, Cochise, leader of the Chiricahuan tribe, came to Granger to discuss peace terms. The two men met in March 1872 at Cañada Alamosa. Peace did not result from that meeting; the Chiricahuas moved instead to the Dragoon Mountains after learning that all Apaches were to be sent to Fort Tularosa. A lasting peace was eventually reached when Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard met with Cochise in October of that year. Granger went on sick leave in 1875, then returned to command the District of New Mexico once more, and died in Santa Fe on the 10th of January 1876. He is buried in Lexington Cemetery in Kentucky.