by Ron Chernow
Analyzing his own symptoms with clinical detachment, he told Dr. Douglas that he would die from a hemorrhage, strangulation, or exhaustion. All physicians could do was “to make my burden of pain as light as possible.”115 He went through terrifying sensations of being strangled by thick ropes of phlegm. “I have no desire to live,” he scribbled to Reverend Newman. “But I do not want you to let my family know this.”116 Despite the relief morphine brought, Grant had a horror of addiction and swallowed only three drops per day. Even though he sipped old port and drank some wine to relieve symptoms, they didn’t help, making him forswear alcohol one last time. “I do not think alcoholic drinks agree with me,” he wrote. “They seem to heat me up and have no other effect.”117
On June 29, Grant composed a private letter to Julia that discussed his burial place for the first time. He was in a quandary since they were “comparative strangers” in New York City. He preferred West Point as his resting place, except that Julia would be excluded there. “I therefore leave you free to select what you think the most appropriate place for depositing my earthly remains.”118 He bid her “a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.”119
Grant had never been especially reflective about the improbable course of his life. Now the whole pattern stood wondrously revealed to him, as he described to Dr. Douglas:
It seems that one man’s destiny in this world is quite as much a mystery as it is likely to be in the next. I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for; yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officers for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for a political life; yet I was twice president of the United States. If anyone had suggested the idea of my becoming an author, as they frequently did I was not sure whether they were making sport of me or not. I have now written a book which is in the hands of the manufacturers.120
Perhaps reflecting on his grievous disappointments with people, he wrote philosophically, “I am glad to say that while there is much unblushing wickedness in this world, yet there is a compensating goodness of the soul.”121
At the end of June, with the first volume of Grant’s memoirs in page proofs, Twain went to Mount McGregor to supervise the final portion. One afternoon, with the voiceless Grant sitting in his porch wicker chair, Twain bantered with Buck and Jesse when the talk turned to James Fish, who had been sentenced the day before. Twain let loose a string of expletives, Jesse condemned his sentence as too light, and Buck engaged in angry oaths. Calmly taking up pad and pencil, Grant wrote, “He was not as bad as the other,” referring to Ferdinand Ward.122 Twain was amazed at Grant’s forbearance, writing that “he never uttered a phrase concerning Ward which an outraged adult might not have uttered concerning an offending child.”123
The dying Grant exerted a powerful symbolic influence upon the American imagination, his illness becoming a grand pageant of North-South reconciliation. Nothing pleased him more than Confederate and Union soldiers alike expressing concern for his condition. On July 10, he received a surprise visit from his old friend Simon Buckner, who had unconditionally surrendered to him at Fort Donelson and wanted Grant to meet his new young wife. Now a Kentucky newspaper editor and soon to be governor, Buckner wished to convey the gratitude of Confederate soldiers who appreciated Grant’s magnanimity at Appomattox. In his written response, Grant attempted to find meaning in the war’s mass suffering: “I have witnessed since my sickness just what I have wished to see ever since the war: harmony and good feeling between the sections . . . I believe myself that the war was worth all it cost us, fearful as it was.”124 Grant emphasized his soldierly bond with Buckner. “The trouble is now made by men who did not go into the war at all, or who did not get mad till the war was over.”125 Although Buckner came as a private citizen, Grant urged him to publicize the visit and retire any residual rancor from the conflict.
In this forgiving spirit, Grant summoned Benjamin Bristow, the crusading treasury secretary who had proven his scourge during the Whiskey Ring investigations. So embittered had Grant been toward Bristow that when he later ran into him in New York, he cut him dead, turning on his heels and walking away in silence. Nevertheless, Bristow set aside his hurt feelings and heeded Grant’s invitation. As soon as he arrived, Grant unburdened himself with a forthright apology. “I want to tell you that I misjudged you,” he murmured. “I thought you were after Babcock to get me, and my administration. I was wrong, and you were right.”126 Bristow was flabbergasted by this contrition from a dying man. Years later he said Grant “never had a more loyal friend or one who labored more zealously to serve him personally & officially.”127 The one person Grant didn’t summon to his bedside was Elihu Washburne, who he believed had betrayed him during the 1880 nomination battle in Chicago.
In his final days, Grant extended an especially warm welcome to Colonel John Eaton, who had been charged with relief and resettlement of blacks during the war. Grant’s face was shrouded by a cloth and Eaton could see little of his features. Grant beckoned him closer with wiggling fingers, then scrawled a message. “I am very glad to see you . . . I should like to have you say something about our . . . utilizing the negroes down about Grand Junction, Tennessee. In writing on that subject for my book I had to rely on memory.”128 Eaton found it infinitely touching that Grant had devoted space to that story alongside the epic chronicle of his own military victories.
Grant believed a special providence kept him alive to complete his book. He was so intent on finishing it that he instructed Fred, if he died and the manuscript wasn’t ready for the printer, he should embalm his body and delay the funeral to wrap it up. “This is now my great interest in life,” he wrote, “to see my work done.”129 On July 16, he put down his pen, his mighty labor over, and informed Dr. Douglas that he was “not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”130 Somehow, in agony, he had produced 336,000 splendid words in the span of a year. He had made a career of comebacks and this one was arguably his most impressive as he battled against mortality to preserve his legacy and protect Julia. Once again he had thoroughly conquered adversity. For Grant, the end of writing now meant the end of life. He took the farewell letter he addressed to his wife on June 29 and placed it in his coat pocket along with a lock of Jesse’s hair and the ring Julia had given him, knowing she would discover these items after his death.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, widely viewed as a masterpiece, is probably the foremost military memoir in the English language, written in a clear, supple style that transcends the torment of its composition. Grant recognized the implausible course of his life, beginning his preface with the humble words “Man proposes and God disposes.”131 He focused on his childhood, West Point, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, omitting his marriage, family life, presidency, Reconstruction, round-the-world trip, and post–White House political involvement. There was not a word about Ferdinand Ward. Grant projected the unassuming modesty, veined with irony, of a man confident of his own worth who didn’t need to bluster to other people. There was no posing, no striking of heroic attitudes, no pretense of being infallible. Scrupulously honest, Grant confessed to doubts and fears on the battlefield and presented the extraordinary spectacle of a self-effacing military man, a hero in spite of himself. An ambivalent message lay at the heart of the narrative. Grant was frankly insistent that the northern cause had been just, the southern misguided. Instead of settling scores, however, he stepped forth one last time as a gracious figure of national harmony.
It never occurred to Grant to delve into embarrassing parts of his story, leading to some breathtaking evasions. He unashamedly skipped over the bleak St. Louis years in the 1850s and didn’t deal with his drinking problem. One of the most striking omissions was any mention of John Rawlins’s vital wartime role in keeping him sober. Perhaps it would be churlish to expect somebody gritting his teeth with pain to excavate such a painful past. Some Grant intimates thought he s
hrank from discussing Rawlins’s role because it would have entailed an admission of his own weakness. But it may also have been the case, as Twain argued, that Grant originally intended to include portraits of other generals, “but he got so many letters from colonels and such, asking to be added that he resolved to put none in and thus avoid the creation of jealousies.”132
Praise for the Personal Memoirs was at first ambivalent. Henry James complained that Grant’s style was “hard and dry as sandpaper.”133 Matthew Arnold found the two volumes full of “sterling good-sense” and praised their prose for “saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.”134 In a less charitable moment, he faulted Grant for writing “an English without charm and high breeding.”135 But William Dean Howells found the book a revelation. “I am reading Grant’s book with the delight I fail to find in novels,” he told Mark Twain, who commended the work as “a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.”136 Twain had more than literary reasons to celebrate the book, which sold in excess of 300,000 two-volume sets. Seven months after Grant’s death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle.
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ON JULY 20, Ulysses S. Grant asked to be rolled over to a scenic spot on the mountaintop that offered a wide-angled vista of the Adirondack foothills to the north, the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, and the Catskills dimly visible to the south. Bundled up with a blanket over his lap, he was wheeled in a bath wagon that had two large wheels in the rear, a smaller one up front, which Harrison Terrell pushed from behind with a metal bar. A few weeks earlier, Terrell had pulled Grant up to the Hotel Balmoral, facetiously complaining he had been reduced to a draft horse, to which Grant scribbled: “For a man who has been accustomed to drive fast horses this is a considerable comedown in point of speed.”137 But this new outing lacked humor and left Grant gasping for air. “He was carried into the drawing room & death seemed to seize him,” said Reverend Newman. “We gathered around him & I prayed for him.”138
As his life neared its end, Grant rested in a circle of family affection and his nine-year-old granddaughter Julia later sketched the scene:
Grandmama was crying quietly and was seated by his side. She had in her hands a handkerchief and a small bottle, perhaps of cologne, and was dampening my grandfather’s brow. His hair was longer and seemed to me more curled, while his eyes were closed in a face more drawn than usual and much whiter. Beads of perspiration stood on the broad forehead, and as I came forward, old Harrison gently wiped similar drops from the back of the hand which was lying quietly on the chair arm. My father [Fred] sat at the opposite side from Grandmama, and the doctor and nurse stood at the head, behind the invalid.139
Characteristically the dying Grant was stoically concerned with his family’s well-being after he was gone, saying, “I hope no one will be distressed on my account.”140 He had already told pastor John Heyl Vincent, “I am ready to go. No Grant ever feared death. I am not afraid to die.”141 At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the Mexican War, saying that her husband had “died as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur.”142 Grant’s corpse weighed ninety pounds and lay under an oval picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was hard to believe this wizened form represented the earthly remains of the stouthearted general. “I think his book kept him alive several months,” Twain wrote upon hearing the news. “He was a very great man and superlatively good.”143 An undertaker rushed to preserve the body with ice before it decayed in the summer heat, embalming Grant under a George Washington portrait. The cadaver was attired in an outfit befitting a president—black suit, patent leather slippers, a little black bow tie—before being sealed under glass in a temporary coffin and covered with an American flag.
For Julia, the desire to rest beside her husband for eternity became her paramount concern in choosing a burial spot. They had spent only a small portion of their lives in New York City, but had become assimilated residents. Grant had praised the town, stating that “through the generosity of [its] citizens I have been enabled to pass my last days without experiencing the pains of pinching want.”144 Many people wanted Grant interred at Arlington National Cemetery or the Soldiers’ Home in Washington and Galena even staked a claim. In opting for a New York tomb, Julia cited four factors: she believed it had been her husband’s preference; she could visit his tomb often; many Americans would be able to come; and—most important—she would be allowed a final resting place by his side. When local opposition arose to a pair of Central Park sites, Mayor William R. Grace suggested the “prominent height” and leafy tranquillity of the comparatively new Riverside Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, overlooking the Hudson River.145
With flags lowered to half-mast across America and mourning symbols swathing the White House, the Grant family conducted a private funeral at Mount McGregor on August 4. Two days later Grant’s casket began a journey southward from Albany to New York City, where three hundred thousand people filed past the open coffin as it lay in state at City Hall. People descended on Manhattan in record numbers for the public funeral on August 8. They poured on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge, descended from elevated railroad stations, and slipped into the city through Grand Central Depot. The 1.5 million people flooding the city would make it the grandest funeral in New York history.
At 8:30 a.m. on August 8, Civil War veterans hoisted Grant’s coffin to a waiting catafalque that had black plumes sprouting at each corner. Twenty-four black stallions, arranged in twelve pairs and attended by black grooms, stood ready to pull the hearse. Twenty generals preceded the horses, led by Winfield Scott Hancock, whose vanity Grant had mocked and who now sat astride a noble black steed. Every protocol for a military funeral was followed, including the riderless horse with boots facing backward in the stirrups. The funeral was a vast, elaborate affair, befitting a monarch or head of state, in marked contrast to the essential simplicity of the man honored. The grandeur emphasized the central place that Grant had occupied in the Civil War and its aftermath. “Out of all the hubbub of the war,” wrote Walt Whitman, “Lincoln and Grant emerge, the towering majestic figures.”146 He thought they had lived exemplary lives that vindicated the American spirit, showing how people lifted from the lower ranks of society could attain greatness. “I think this the greatest lesson of our national existence so far.”147
The procession streamed up Broadway until it reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square, where it took on a veritable army of dignitaries, including all the members of the Grant family except for Julia, who remained secluded at Mount McGregor. President Cleveland headed an eminent escort that included Vice President Thomas Hendricks, the entire cabinet, and Supreme Court justices. Both surviving ex-presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, attended. Congress and statehouses across the country emptied out to pay homage, sending fifteen U.S. senators, twelve congressmen, eighteen governors, and ten mayors to pay their respects. From city halls across America eight thousand civil and municipal officers converged to participate in the march.
Nobody doubted that William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan would serve as honorary pallbearers, but Julia Grant knew her husband would have wanted two Confederate generals to balance their northern counterparts, so Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner represented the South. Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. “It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their dru
ms marked Staunton, Va.,” one said. “They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops.”148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers, supplemented by eighteen thousand veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. Rabbi E. B. M. Browne acted as an honorary pallbearer, a reminder of how thoroughly Grant had atoned for his wartime action against the Jews. At Grant’s death, Philadelphia’s Jewish Record observed, “None will mourn his loss more sincerely than the Hebrew, and . . . in every Jewish synagogue and temple in the land the sad event will be solemnly commemorated with fitting eulogy and prayer.”149
Southern reaction to Grant’s death signified a posthumous triumph. His onetime image as a fierce warrior of the Civil War had been replaced by that of a more pacific figure. As the News and Courier of South Carolina editorialized, “Had his life ended but a few years since, the mourning for the great leader would have been more or less sectional in its manifestation. Dying as he now dies, the grief is as widespread as the Union.”150 Grant had won over unlikely southern converts. When John Singleton Mosby learned of his death, he was bereft: “I felt I had lost my best friend.”151 In Gainesville, Georgia, a white-bewhiskered James Longstreet emerged in a dressing gown to tell a reporter emotionally that Grant “was the truest as well as the bravest man that ever lived.”152 In southern towns and border states, veterans from North and South linked arms as they paid tribute to Grant’s passage. Black churches held “meetings of sorrow” that eulogized Grant as a champion of the Fifteenth Amendment and the fight to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. Summing up Grant’s career, Frederick Douglass wrote: “In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”153
