And here's another ATL the credit for which must go to TyranicusMaximus.
The POD will be from an ATL Biography of General Grant called: The Grey Fox's War: Grant and the Confederacy:
One of the great ironies of the terrible US Civil War was that a society of Southern slaveholders would find its two greatest leaders in Northern-born men. Josiah Gorgas, the logistical genius Major General who helped ensure CS armies were always supplied by ammunition has been far overshadowed by the Grey Fox, the Ohio-born CS general who made CS independence so nearly a reality. Hiram Ulysses Grant's father as related had always been strongly anti-slavery, but his tanning profession and overall personality did not go together well with his genius son.
Grant's successes as a farmer were from an opportunistic decision to purchase from Colonel Dent good land, where he raised enough crops with slave labor to start rising to become one of the small farmers of Kentucky. It was this prosperity and the outright rage and pique of his father at this that led to Grant choosing to sympathize with slavery. He would be one of the least prejudiced CS generals, but he would in fact be a supporter of slavery as they all were. During the lead-in to secession, Grant came to identify with the secessionists, deciding as with other small slaveholders that enthusiastic backing of slavery and slavery's preservation in a new nation would make a pathway to further gain.
Grant would be among the few Northern-born officers when the Southern states seceded in 1860, in response to John Brown's bizarrely planned and thought-out raid to go South. With him would go the highest-ranking officer in the Confederacy, Samuel Cooper, John Pemberton, and Josiah Gorgas of Northern-born officers to reach high command. From his distinguished Mexican War record and from his political connections to Kentucky, a state the Confederacy desperately wanted, Grant would be among the West Pointers nominated to the rank of Brigadier General by Jefferson Davis.
His overall commanding officer was Albert Sidney Johnston, and it would be Grant who would become that most dynamic and unusual Confederate officer, surpassing all his contemporaries, including Robert E. Lee whose fizzling performance as a field officer would paradoxically create a close friendship between Tidewater Aristocrat and Tanner's Son. Grant, who had found himself some financial stability for his family in slavery and slave farming was to soon face in General Henry Halleck and in Brigadier General William T. Sherman his first major opponents.....