Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?
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In the 1890s, Morningside Heights took shape as Manhattan’s Acropolis, with the beginning of construction of Columbia University, Barnard College, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Luke’s Hospital, and Grant’s Tomb. Today is President Grant’s 185th birthday. (A special ceremony, co-sponsored by the U.S. Military Academy and the National Park Service, will take place at the tomb at 11:00 a.m.) After his defeat for the Republican presidential nomination for a third term in 1880, Grant settled in New York City. Investment failures put the former president in financial difficulties, which coincided with the onset of the throat cancer that would soon kill him. To stave off his family’s ruin, he wrote his “Personal Memoirs,” an unexpected literary masterpiece that also made his family a great deal of money.
Mrs. Grant, who is entombed (not buried) beside her husband at the General Grant National Memorial (as it is officially known) at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street, wanted the tomb to be in New York City. Ten years ago, the memorial was rededicated on its centennial, after a National Park Service refurbishment was prompted by a threat from Grant’s descendants to move President’s and Mrs. Grant’s bodies from New York to Illinois unless something was done to remedy the vandalism, neglect, and graffiti that had made the memorial a civic disgrace.
The memorial was erected between 1891 and 1897. (Grant was interred for 12 years in a temporary tomb in Riverside Park.) The architect John Duncan adapted his design from the ancient tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. The memorial sports two fine colonnades, the wraparound Ionic of the drum up top, and the Greek Doric of the portico with its grand stair. Unfortunately, an elaborate sculptural program was never carried out, and the memorial cries out for further embellishment. The inside is better, with its coffered vaults and dome, exuberantly ornamented pendentives, and lunette murals by Allyn Cox (1896–1982), installed in 1966. Cox was the son of the painter and critic Kenyon Cox and had in the 1950s completed Constantino Brumidi’s great frieze in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cox painted additional murals for the Capitol. The three paintings he did for Grant’s Tomb include a scene of Robert E. Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomattox Court House.
Ulysses Grant is best memorialized in Washington, D.C., by the improbably elaborate Grant Memorial, designed by Henry Shrady. In New York, the equestrian statue of Grant, by William Partridge, in Grant Square in Crown Heights, is a masterpiece. The tomb may not be up to the artistic standard of those other memorials. But Americans of the 1880s understood Grant’s greatness better than we do today: 90,000 citizens contributed funds toward the construction of the tomb, and New Yorkers should be very proud that it is here.
