By the way - Grant’s papers ending up at Mississippi State is really no more surprising than learning that the first president of Louisiana State University was none other than William Tecumseh Sherman.

In 1853, Sherman left the army. In 1859, he was hired as the first, and very popular, superintendent of the newly-established Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. (He resigned to go north when the war began.) Lousiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy morphed into Louisiana State University in 1870. (As Union forces approached the area during the war, the Confederate commander ordered it destroyed. It was spared thanks to a request from, you guessed it, Sherman.)

In another one of those freak coincidences, one of Sherman’s jobs early in his pre-war army career (1840 -1853) was to settle various vendor claims in South Carolina and Georgia - and his travels took him over much of the same ground he would cover, in the opposite direction, on his campaigns from Chattanooga to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Savannah (March to the Sea), and the final campaign from Savannah up through the Carolinas until Johnson surrendered.