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Federal (USV)

Lieutenant

Frederick Winslow Grannis

(1822 - 1890)

Home State: New York

Branch of Service: Infantry

Unit: 61st New York Infantry

Before Antietam

He was Cashier of the Lewis County Bank in Martinsburg, NY, from 1852 until it failed in 1854. On 8 September 1861, then age 39, he enlisted in New York City for three years and mustered as Corporal in Company D, 61st NY Infantry on 18 September. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, Company B on 21 July 1862 (to date from 28 April).

On the Campaign

He was in action with his Company at Antietam, and Colonel Miles reported:

Captain Maze, Lieut. W. Keech, Lieut. Frederick W. Grannis, and Lieut. T.W. Greig were noticed as behaving in the most excellent manner ...
Grannis later wrote to the widow of Private Hugh Gallagher who was killed there at the Sunken Lane.

The rest of the War

He was promoted to First Lieutenant and appointed Adjutant on 17 November 1862 (dated 1 October), was cited again, for actions at Chancellorsville, VA in May, and was at Gettysburg in July. He was promoted to Captain on 14 September, but not mustered at that rank, and was discharged on 26 February 1864.

After the War

By 1882 he was an agent with offices at 665 Broadway in New York City and had an appointment as Post Office Clerk. He may have used the title "Colonel" (or it was used for him), though he did not achieve that rank during the war.

References & notes

Service information from State of New York.1 Mention of him on the Maryland Campaign in Fuller.2 Details from Frederick A. Strong's Descendants of Edward Grannis (1927) and other family genealogists, and Hough's History of Lewis County, New York (1888). His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married Mary Maria Bennett (1834-1915) in 1852 and they had 2 children. He then married Elizabeth Bartlett (1840-1926) in 1865; they divorced. He married again, Martha Lorinda Smith (1850-1927), in 1879, and they had 2 more children.

More on the Web

His second wife, Elizabeth, was a well known "editor, publisher, and philanthropist" in New York who was an early advocate for gender equality and women's social and political rights. She lived with President Woodrow Wilson's father Joseph, (probably after his wife died in 1888) until about 1894. See more about her in a capsule bio from Appleton's Cyclopedia (1918, via GoogleBooks) and a brief feature from her alma mater Lake Erie College.

Birth

07/02/1822; Utica, NY

Death

1890; Staten Island, NY; burial in Fairview Cemetery, Castleton Corners, Staten Island, NY

Notes

1   State of New York, Adjutant-General, Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of New York [year]: Registers of the [units], 43 Volumes, Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1893-1905, Issue 25 (for 1900)  [AotW citation 7659]

2   Fuller, Charles Augustus, Personal Recollections of the War of 1861... in the Sixty-first Regiment, New York Volunteer Infantry, Sherburne (NY): News Job Printing House, 1906, pp. 53 - 73  [AotW citation 7671]