Welcome to Knoxville, Gen. Grant (Curt Fields)

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Curt Fields, Ulysses S. Grant

Curt Fields will be the speaker at the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable on Tuesday, March 14, at 7 p.m. (See details for the dinner on the left side of the page.

Dr. E. C. (Curt) Fields, Jr., is an avid and lifelong student of the American Civil War. His interest in portraying General Ulysses S. Grant was driven by that study and his deep respect and admiration for General Grant. Dr. Fields is the same height and body type as General Grant and therefore presents a convincing, true-to-life image of the man as he really looked. He researches and reads extensively about General Grant to deliver an accurate persona of the General. His presentations are in first person, quoting from General Grant’s Memoirs, articles and letters the General wrote, and statements he made in interviews.

Curt Fields as Gen. Grant

Dr. Fields holds a Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Education from the University of Memphis. He later earned a Master’s degree in Secondary Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Curriculum from Michigan State University. He is a career educator who taught for eight years at the junior and senior high school levels and then served for 25 years as a high school administrator. He also has taught as an adjunct Sociology Professor at the University of Memphis and in Education for Belhaven University’s Memphis campus.

Dr. Fields is now an educational consultant and living historian. As a consultant, he has worked in leadership development as espoused and practiced by General Grant with several corporate and civic groups. As a living historian, Dr. Fields portrayed General Grant at the 150th Sesquicentennial observations of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Raymond, Vicksburg, and at Appomattox Court House in 2015. He has portrayed the general on film as well staring as General Grant in the Visitor Center film shown at Appomattox Court House National Historic Park and in the Discovery Channel’s three-part documentary series “How Booze built America.” Dr. Fields also was featured as General Grant, giving his life story, on the Civil War Trust website.

A frequent contributor to “The Civil War Courier” (A Civil War monthly newspaper), Dr. Fields is a member of The Tennessee Historical Society, The West Tennessee Historical Society, The Shelby County Historical Society, The Nathan Bedford Forrest Historical Society, The Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association, The Appomattox 1865 Foundation, The 290 Foundation (dedicated to the Civil War Navies), The Civil War Trust, and the Ulysses S. Grant Association.

Up next (March 14, 2017): the days leading to Appomattox

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Appomattox, Curt Fields, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant

In the last days of March, 1865, Lieutenant General U. S. Grant had planned to assault General Robert E. Lee’s thinly-manned lines around Petersburg, Virginia.

Curt Fields as U.S. Grant

He felt that enough time had dragged by in the nearly year-long campaign and that Lee could not withstand a simultaneous attack all along his lines. However, General Lee, anticipating the assault, attacked Grant first. That attempted break-out failed, and Lee began to fall back, abandoning Richmond in the process. The next few days were a blur as one savage battle after another was fought by a far- from-dead Army of Northern Virginia. But Lee was running out of time and food.

On April 7th, Grant sent the first letter to Lee of what became a short series of exchanges between the two generals, a series that culminating in the surrender meeting in the most unlikely of places for such a momentous event.

At the next KCWRT meeting, General Grant (played by historian Curt Fields) will talk of those letters and what was transpiring during the two days they were exchanged.

The General will also speak about the actual meeting between himself and General Lee, what was said, and what happened in the 75 or so minutes they were together in Wilmer McLean’s parlor. He will address what he said in the surrender letter he wrote to General Lee effectively ending the war, and why he wrote what he did. He will also touch briefly on the unintended ramifications his letter later had on President Andrew Johnson’s Cabinet and administration.

The next KCWRT meeting is Tuesday, March 14. Details are at the left of this page.