Buried: General Grant National Memorial, New York, New York
Eighteenth President - 1869-1877
Born: April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio
Died: 8:06 a.m. on July 23, 1885, in Mount McGregor, New York
Age at death: 63
Cause of death: Throat cancer
Final words: “Water.”
Admission to General Grant National Memorial:
Free
Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the Civil War’s battlefields, was terrified in the presence of animal blood. So consuming was his fear that he ordered steaks extra-well done. Grant’s squeamishness did not extend to the front lines. His military leadership won him the Republican nomination for president in 1868. The war and scandal-weary nation hoped the general could restore peace.
Following his two terms as president, Grant embarked in 1877 on an ambitious two-year tour of the world with his wife Julia and son Jesse. He met with several heads of state, including Queen Victoria, and later cooperated in documenting the tour in a book. When he returned, Grant settled in Galena, Illinois. In 1880 he led the field for the Republican nomination for the presidency. James Garfield edged out the former president by just sixty-six votes, thus preventing Grant from becoming the first person to be nominated for a third term. Grant’s luck worsened when a series of schemes in which he invested failed, leaving him penniless and publicly humiliated.
Entrance to Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive and 122nd Street in New York City
After he complained of frequent sore throats in the spring of 1884, doctors ordered the general, a lifelong cigar smoker, to stop smoking. The following year he began to lose his voice and had trouble swallowing. Doctors diagnosed cancer of the throat. Grant had such difficulty swallowing food that by the following spring he’d lost nearly seventy-five pounds, almost half his weight. His doctors treated him with a mixture of pain-relieving drugs—morphine and cocaine, to which the former president gradually became addicted. He soon lost the ability to speak above a whisper and communicated primarily with notes. His coughing fits grew so bad that Grant was frequently forced to sleep sitting up in a chair so as not to choke to death. During those many sleepless nights, Grant began work on his autobiography.
In June of 1885, Grant moved from New York City to Mount McGregor, New York, to continue work on his memoirs; he hoped to earn enough money to leave his wife financially secure after his death. Yet within a month, his health took a turn for the worse. By July 22, Ulysses Grant was fading in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes when his wife spoke to him and in one of his final statements said, “I don’t want anybody to feel distressed on my account.” His only spoken word after that was a request for water. After suffering increasing difficulty breathing, doctors gave him brandy for the pain and applied hot cloths to warm his extremities.
The scene surrounding Grant’s deathbed was a crowded one. In addition to his family, several doctors, nurses, a minister, a stenographer, and a sculptor (for the death mask) gathered around the dying man in the parlor of his home. When he died on the morning of July 23, the first news reports were on the wire within two minutes.
After he became ill, Grant had considered three potential sites for his burial: West Point, eliminated because the academy would not allow his wife to be buried with him; Galena, Illinois, where he received his first general’s commission; and New York City. Unknown to the general, his family had also discussed burial at the Old Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C. Ultimately, a site was recommended overlooking the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here, he was laid to rest on August 8, 1885, following one of the largest pageants the country had ever witnessed: sixty thousand people marched in his funeral procession.
New York City’s African-American population played a leading role in the initial planning and funding for Grant’s tomb. Richard Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard, was secretary of the Grant Monument Association. In 1888, he organized a design competition to gather proposals from architects for a suitable monument. The winner was an elaborate granite and white marble tomb designed by John Duncan. The tomb, which broke with the then-current fashion of erecting obelisks, was completed in 1897 and dedicated by President William McKinley in a ceremony attended by a crowd estimated at one million people. It is the largest mausoleum in North America. Grant’s wife Julia was buried alongside him when she died in 1902.
Touring Ulysses S. Grant’s Tomb at the General Grant National Memorial
After years of disrepair, the General Grant National Memorial is now restored. Operated by the National Park Service, the memorial is located at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street in New York City on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Operating hours are from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., daily, except New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas. Admission is free.
To reach the memorial by car: Take the Henry Hudson Parkway to the 95th Street exit. Go north on Riverside Drive to 122nd Street. A limited amount of street parking is available.
To reach the memorial by subway: Take the Seventh Avenue-Broadway #1 subway train, which stops at the West 116th Street station on Broadway, two blocks east and six blocks south of Grant’s Tomb.
Bus service is provided on Riverside Drive up to 120th Street by route M-5. To reach the memorial by bus: Take the M11 bus to Amsterdam Avenue and West 118th Street.
For additional information
Superintendent
General Grant National Memorial
Riverside Drive and 122nd Street
New York, NY 10003
Phone: (212) 932-9631
Fax: (212) 666-1679
www.nps.gov/gegr
“Doctors applied a cocaine solution to dull the excruciating pain of throat cancer, the result of Grant’s twenty-cigar-a-day habit.”
—Richard Norton Smith
In fact, there is nothing new about fascination with death, especially as it affects the politically celebrated who can outrun any opponent but time. In the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died by inches while an eager public camped outside the twelve-room cottage on New York’s Mount McGregor. Inside the old hero was attempting to recoup his losses from a Wall Street swindle by penning his war memoirs for Mark Twain.
Doctors applied a cocaine solution to dull the excruciating pain of throat cancer, the result of Grant’s twenty-cigar-a-day habit. Nightly injections of morphine enabled the patient to gain strength for the next day’s incessant scribbling. As the death watch dragged on, knots of curiosity seekers climbed the wooded mountain slope to observe the general on his front porch, a skeletal figure in top hat and shawls, conjuring memories of Vicksburg and the Wilderness while gazing off toward the Saratoga battlefield.
When the disease permanently silenced verbal communication, Grant scrawled a poignantly humorous note to his doctors. “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I think I signify all three.”
Nor did this marvelous Victorian melodrama end with Grant’s death on July 23, 1885. Too many old soldiers had too much invested in their commander’s glory, and glorification, to consign him to a temporary vault on 122nd Street. Hard times slowed the effort to build a shrine worthy of the Union’s military savior, as did a rival campaign to install the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal in New York harbor.
In 1890, the Senate passed a bill to remove Grant’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery, a step staunchly opposed by the general’s widow, Julia. Whatever their motive, the lawmakers succeeded in prodding New York’s dilatory fundraisers. On April 27, 1897, Grant’s seventy-fifth birthday, a million people lined the streets of Manhattan to watch aging warriors of the Grand Army of the Republic and ambassadors from twenty-seven nations join President McKinley in dedicating the largest mausoleum in America.
Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia lie side by side in Grant’s mammoth marble tomb
To the novelist Henry James, Grant’s Tomb symbolized “democracy in the all together…an unguarded shrine where all could come and go at their own will.” Inside, beneath mosaics depicting his martial triumphs, the general and his lady lie in twin ten-ton sarcophogi carved from Wisconsin porphyry, Julia having rejected the idea of a single monument. “General Grant must have his own sarcophagus, and I must have mine beside him,” she explained. “Hereafter when persons visit this spot, they must be able to say ‘here rests General Grant.’” If his presidency, crooked as a dog’s hind leg, tarnished Grant’s historical standing, it certainly hadn’t diminished his hold on popular affections.
—RNS