Essay: Who Is Buried in Grant's Tomb?

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Ulysses Grant sat on the porch and marched armies across his memory. He called them up through cocaine and morphine, through the pain in his throat, and into a perfect clarity of prose. He fought the war minutely all over again: Shiloh and Vicksburg, the slaughters of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, where men were so sure of death that they pinned their names and addresses on their jackets for easy identification when they fell. And at last, the mythy set piece of Appomattox, where Lee came as the elegant last cavalier, and Grant, a shabby cigar stub of a man, appeared in dusty blues open at the throat, one button in the wrong hole, no sword, to embody the victory of some other American principle.

Grant remembered it all on the porch of a cottage at Mount McGregor in the foothills of the Adirondacks in the summer of 1885, 100 years ago. He was dying of cancer. As he sat in a silk top hat, reassembling the past, tourists came to stare at him from a little distance. He let them watch, even wanted them to. So many planes of the public and the private intersected in Grant: the obscure American failure who saved the Union. Now, at the last, the shabby embarrassment who was also the first genius of industrial warfare made the intimate business of his dying a sort of public spectacle. Grant harbored complications. If he was of all men the typical American, as his friend William Tecumseh Sherman thought, the incendiary of Atlanta also admitted, "I do not understand him, and I do not believe he understands himself." That was the oddness of Grant. In Hannah Arendt's phrase, Adolf Eichmann represented "the banality of evil." In a way, Grant represented the banality of a momentary greatness. Or perhaps the mysterious possibilities of the ordinary.

In the Mount McGregor drama, terminal and succinct, there was a sleazy commercial dimension that savored of the scandals of his White House years. The owners of the resort at Mount McGregor had actually attracted Grant to come and die in comfort there, a sort of publicity stunt. Grant went along with it. But as he enacted that odd humiliation, he was, in the privacy of his mind and on his lined note pad, composing his memoirs, one of the strongest and purest documents of American public life.

Ulysses Grant eventually receded to become a haunting half mystery of American life. Down the generations he has stayed cocooned, in memory, in a stoical mediocrity. H.L. Mencken said Grant was the kind of man who would say to someone he encountered, "Meet the wife." He possessed an eerie philistine equilibrium, remarking once that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. What stuck mostly in memory as the decades passed were the shabby things: the scandals and swindles and, ignominiously, the talk about his drinking. He did drink too much now and then, when he was depressed, and especially when he was away from the stabilizing influence of his wife Julia, whom he adored.