I’ve lived in the West 70s in Manhattan for more than 20 years. It took me several years before I saw the General Grant National Memorial, better known as Grant’s Tomb, after I started to jog in Riverside Park and eventually discovered—only after I started to jog far enough!—that from down in the park there was a path that rose up to it.
I first saw it in springtime, before the trees were full with leaves, and it was in that instance devoid of the flags and bunting.1
I immediately felt it was a structure than should be better known by New Yorkers and all Americans, even though I knew very little about Grant himself then.
I guess I was perhaps a bit embarrassed by having not seen it sooner and having had no idea of the specifics of it—(I had a vague mental image of something domed)—or how large it is, even though I was aware of it at a basic level and of its basic location.
I had no idea at the time just how immensely popular the Tomb used to be. Through 1918, it attracted more visitors each year than the Statue of Liberty did.2
Since my first encounter with the Tomb, I’ve read more about Grant. I’m excited for the excellent Ulysses S. Grant commemorations planned for 2022, the 200th anniversary of his birth (April 27, 1822, in rural Ohio). Nonetheless, the attention that Grant’s life and legacy will receive from his bicentennial will be insufficient in proportion to his import in American history.
Grant’s record certainly is imperfect as a general and as a U.S. president. But that record is also more positive and more deserving of dissemination than it was made out to be during most of the 20th century when it faced misrepresentation and even outright falsehoods.
I’m pleased to have the Memorial so near to me. Though I confess that for Grant’s sake I sometimes wish it was in Washington, D.C. on the Tidal Basin or near to or alongside the National Mall.
Among the other currency presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, the edifice memorials of three of whom loom large in the nation’s capital, as well as Theodore Roosevelt who’s on Mount Rushmore if not currency, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who until relatively recently was on currency, it is Ulysses S. Grant who had the best presidential record on civil rights apart from Lincoln.
In fact, after Grant no president had profounder civil right record until Lyndon B. Johnson one hundred years later.
Additionally, Grant served the greatest military role in the nation’s history, except Washington’s own—greater than Jackson’s or Eisenhower’s or those of other lauded American generals, including Pershing and Patton.
In light of such a record that belies so much of what detractors say, the Memorial should be better known, and would be if it was located in Washington, D.C.
However, among the biographical paths of the aforementioned presidents, Grant’s life journey has always felt to me to be a step or two differently aligned. And in that sense, having the home of his memorial structure in a different kind of setting seems fitting.
Among those presidents, Grant was the most taciturn, the least charismatic, and I think, arguably, the most domestic in temperament. Though within him he held the ability, when called for, to be profoundly determined, as evidenced not only during the war but when, in retirement, having been swindled into nearly complete bankruptcy, and enduring painful, terminal throat cancer, he penned his remarkable military memoirs in order to better provide for his wife’s and his children’s futures.
So, I find it appropriate that the general and president who hated pomp and parades, including military ones, and did not much like Washington, D.C., should have a structure, and his and his wife’s resting place, on an island, in a verdant spot, near the Hudson River, devoid of anything else nearby that is political, governmental, or military.3
My first impression of the Tomb as an underappreciated historical monument of an underappreciated general and president is still my impression today when I see it. For those who agree with me, there are no better correctives than to visit it if one can, to mention it when apt, including online, to join the Grant Monument Association and other Grant-related nonprofits—like the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark and the U.S. Grant Boyhood Home and Schoolhouse—to remember Grant (and Julia, too) in all his feats, features, flaws, and foibles, and to heed his call that is etched on the Memorial: “Let Us Have Peace.”
