Ulysses S. Grant is more of a Bulldog than you think.

During the Civil War, an editorial cartoon portrayed the general — then taking it on the chin in Virginia — as a tenacious bulldog. As U.S. Grant Presidential Library Executive Director Anne Marshall tells the story, the similarity in monikers was only the beginning of why Grant’s presidential library belongs at Mississippi State University.

Mississippi, after all, helped make Grant’s career, she said.

“Grant saved the Union, while Mississippi was among the first to secede from it,” she said. “His most brilliant and definitive victory came at Vicksburg in 1863. … After the war, he was largely responsible for crushing the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi and (was responsible for) the federal presence to enforce the Reconstruction amendments.”

Although Grant has clear historical ties to the state, bringing his papers and artifacts to MSU was a bit circuitous, she said. The collection started off as a pet project of John Simon, a historian at Southern Illinois University. When he retired, the university didn’t want to support the collection. John Marszalek, a retired history professor at MSU, stepped in.

“He thought MSU would be a great place to house the collection, and in 2009 he approached incoming MSU President Mark Keenum,” she said. “(Keenum) jumped on the opportunity immediately.”

The collection came to MSU in 2009, where it was housed in a single gallery on the ground floor of the Mitchell Memorial Library. Three years later, the collection was designated as a presidential library, making MSU one of only six universities to house one. Shortly after that, the university built a $10 million facility added to the fourth floor of the library.

The Grant library now sprawls across 21,000 square feet, and is the largest single collection of the general’s papers in the world.

“We have 15,000 linear feet of Grant correspondence, of research notes, photographs, scrapbooks,” Marshall said. “We also have 4,000 published monographs with some connection to Grant.”

The library also includes a museum, which sees about 4,000 visitors a year, she said.

Scholarship at the library has helped fuel a resurgence of interest in — and rehabilitation of — Grant’s life, she said.

“In his own time, he was lionized for his military accomplishments and was the most famous American alive,” she said. “His funeral cortege was seven miles long. But he was also heavily criticized. People labeled him a drunk … they said his success was only due to luck and having more men to throw at the enemy.”

He faced stiff criticism during his presidency due to a parade of corruption scandals, she said.

“Historians in the last decade have really rescued him,” she said. “He was not a lucky commander, he was a brilliant strategist and tactician. … While he had some shortcomings as a president, he wasn’t personally corrupt. If anything he was too quick to trust the people around him, and was a bad judge of character at worst.”

The library also hosts memorabilia from another great defender of the Union: Abraham Lincoln.

They were donated by Judge Frank and Virginia Williams, she said. Frank, a former chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, was in the Ulysses S. Grant Association.

“He was so impressed by the way MSU stepped up to support the Grant Library that he decided to donate his entire collection to us,” Marshall said.

The library houses “thousands and thousands” of items with ties to Lincoln, she said.

Admission to the library is free. It is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. For more information, visit https://www.usgrantlibrary.org/.

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