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Famous Guests at Liberty Hill Lts U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee
Several of the Bryson family writings indicate that the two young men who would become leaders of the opposing armiies of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee and U.S. Grant,had on two different occasions stopped at the Bryson Stage Stop in Liberty Hill. Upon further research, indeed both men had occasion to pass through central Texas which would have put them in the vacinity of Liberty Hill.
GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE, SOLDIER IN THE U.S.ARMY AND LATER COMMANDER OF THE CONFEDERATE ARMIES DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
Lt. Lee first came to Texas during the
war
with Mexico(1846) and later returned as part of the camel experiment in Texas. It was during this latter excursion that Robert E. Lee was a guest at the Bryson Stage Stop. Lee graduated from
West Point and distinguished himself in the Mexican War 1846-48. In 1861 Robert E. Lee
joined the army of the Confederacy of Southern states; in 1862 he received the
command of the Army of Northern Virginia and won the Seven Days' Battle
defending Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, against General
McClellan's Union forces. In 1863, Lee won victories at Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville, both in Virginia,and in 1864 at Cold Harbor, Virginia, but was
besieged in Petersburg,Virginia,June 1864-April 1865. He surrendered to General
Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse. Following the war Lee was
paroled and served as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee
University),a small college with forty students and four professors, earning a
salary of $1500 a year. Lee had commanded thousands of young men in battle. Now
he wanted to prepare a few hundred of them for the duties of peace
U.S. Grant
U.S. Grant (Hiram Ulysses Grant), another West Point graduate, served as quartermaster in
the U.S. army during the war with Mexico after the annexation of Texas by the
U.S. Grant fought in the battle of Palo Alto Mexico in May, 1848.
After the Mexican War, Grant journied north to his new assignment at a post in Detroit, Michigan. In the spring of 1852, Grant was transferred from an
outpost on Lake Ontario in Sackets Harbor, New York to an army post in
California.
While in California, Grant resigned from the army and returned to
the east as a clerk in a leather store. It was during this return trip by stagecoach that Lt. Grant was a guest at the Bryson Stage Stop in 1852.
HIRAM ULYSSIS GRANT, SOLDIER, GENERAL, AND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (1869-1877)
On June 17, 1861, Grant was appointed a Colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry. Then on August 17, 1861, he was appointed Brigadier General. In 1864, Grant was appointed General in Chief of all U.S. armies by President Lincoln.
On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant in the McLean House, Appomattox, Virginia ending the Civil War.
On May 21, 1868, Grant was nominated as a candidate for President by the Republican National Convention in Chicago and went on to become President of the U.S.(1869-1877).
Grant died of cancer in 1885.
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