CHAPTER 42

Old Soldiers

When Ferdinand Ward’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, Grant had two hundred dollars to his name, and, he soon learned, throat cancer. But he also still had many fans and good friends. Dan Sickles, Hamilton Fish, and William Tecumseh Sherman were among the latter. So was Mark Twain. The new monthly The Century, an illustrated family magazine, was having great success publishing stories about the war, and it contracted Grant to write a series about some of his battles. The stories went over well and he started getting offers from book publishers for his full memoirs. Twain and his brother-in-law Charles Webster had founded Webster and Company to publish Twain’s books, and they were enjoying success with Huckleberry Finn. Twain trumped all offers for his friend’s book, promising Grant a healthy $10,000 advance and 70 percent of the profits.

Grant raced to complete his two-volume Personal Memoirs as his health deteriorated. The Tribune and other papers filed regular reports on the progress of both the manuscript and his health. Well-wishers took to gathering on 63rd Street to cheer him whenever he stepped out the door. Webster and Company received an unprecedented sixty thousand advance orders. In June 1885 a new resort near Saratoga Springs, Mount McGregor, offered the Grants a free cottage for the summer. The promoter of the resort later explained, “I thought if we could get him to come here to Mount McGregor, and if he should die there it might make the place a national shrine, and incidentally a success.” The woods around the cottage were thick with reporters as Grant pushed himself to the finish, unable to speak, the cancer gnawing him away to less than a hundred pounds. He completed volume 2 on July 18, 1885, and died in his bed, his family around him, five days later.

New York City, Washington, and several other cities appealed to the family for the honor of being the general’s final resting place. New York mayor William R. Grace proved the most convincing suitor. Civic leaders in other cities grumbled about “the New York Takeover.” The Times crowed that it was “A Most Fitting Burial Place: The Nation’s Greatest Hero Should Rest in the Nation’s Greatest City.” Grace organized a Grant Memorial Association of top-tier New Yorkers, including J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Chester A. Arthur, Hamilton Fish, and Joseph Pulitzer. They set out to raise an audacious $1 million. Over the next several years everyone from robber barons to schoolchildren would contribute. After considering Central Park, the Grant family agreed on placing the monument in the new Riverside Park, a sliver of green facing the Hudson on the Upper West Side. It was a rather lonely spot, but a quiet and pretty one.

President Cleveland meanwhile offered the family a state funeral and appointed Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who’d helped save Dan Sickles’s bacon at Gettysburg, to oversee the arrangements. Hancock and a staff of forty set up on Governors Island. It was not an easy task. Every veteran, politician, dignitary, military unit, and civic organization in the country wanted a place in the ceremonies.

After stops in Albany and West Point, Grant’s funeral train arrived at Grand Central (the original, one of Commodore Vanderbilt’s last achievements) on August 6. A quarter of a million mourners filed past his casket in the black-draped City Hall that day and the next. Grant’s funeral procession in New York City on Saturday, August 8, was larger than Lincoln’s. It took five hours to pass under the window where his friend Twain watched. Half a million visitors joined the city’s million residents in the streets. Twenty years earlier, only the North had mourned for Lincoln. Now, as the Times put it, “The Reunited Republic Buries Gen. Grant.”

The day dawned “heavy and sullen,” according to the Times, but cleared and turned hot by afternoon. At City Hall the coffin was placed onto a flat, open horse-drawn cart. The procession included somber marching bands, gray-bearded Civil War veterans both Union and Confederate on horse and on foot, regiments of soldiers and sailors and marines, mounted and foot police, and scores of black carriages carrying bishops and rabbis, President Grover Cleveland, senators and aldermen, mayors and governors from as far away as California. “Gen. Dan Sickles, as erect and soldierly as ever, and with almost all his old-time spirit in his eyes,” rode at the head of Third Corps veterans. “His crutches were strapped by the horse’s side. His stump was fitted into a socket made on purpose for it in the saddle,” The Sun reported.

All the windows, doors, and lampposts along the route wore black crepe or flag bunting as the procession wound slowly up Broadway, then Fifth Avenue, then the Boulevard (as Broadway above Columbus Circle was then known) to 72nd Street. The Times described how “every balcony, window, and door commanding a view of the line was teeming; the roofs and cornices swarmed; there was not an accessible point, however high and dangerous, but had its observer; men climbed the telegraph poles and clung to the wires; boys were high in the trees… the statues in the squares were black with climbers.”

At 72nd Street the procession entered Riverside Park. Grant’s temporary vault was a simple brick affair surrounded by hemlocks. A wooden reviewing stand was set up outside. There was an embarrassing crush when it was discovered that the stand could not hold all the gathered dignitaries. In a classic New York City moment, a handful of con artists trying to hawk seats for fifty cents each were chased away by the cops. After funeral services, rifle volleys, and the playing of Dan Butterfield’s “Taps,” the vault was sealed and its iron gate locked, the key remaining with the Parks Department. By midnight only eight soldiers in blue remained, guarding the site.

Construction of the Grant Monument began in 1892. Grant was moved there in a solemn ceremony in 1897. As he had requested, Julia joined him there when she died in 1902. Into the 1910s the Grant Monument—known colloquially as Grant’s Tomb—was the city’s most popular attraction, outdrawing even the Statue of Liberty. But Grant’s star dimmed as the twentieth century progressed. Lincoln eclipsed him as the great hero of the Civil War, and Grant was increasingly identified as the corrupt bumbler of his postwar years. With Morningside Heights growing up around it, the monument deteriorated into what the Times called in 1994 a “graffiti-scarred hangout for drug dealers and muggers.” As its centennial approached, plans to clean up and restore the site failed to generate much interest among New Yorkers. Responding to the old joke “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” the Times columnist John Tierney sneered, “Who cares?” The restoration was accomplished in time, but the monument remains lonely and remote, a sparsely visited tribute to a poorly remembered hero. There are days when only Dan Butterfield seems to be paying it any attention.

Dan Sickles outlived Grant by nearly thirty years. When he returned to New York from Europe in 1879 he was probably sixty but often shaved a few years off when asked, still an imperious and imposing figure, extravagantly mustachioed, standing ramrod straight in his crutches. He had an artificial leg but preferred the crutches, with the empty pants leg pinned up to make plain just what he’d sacrificed for his country. When Mark Twain met the general, he got the impression that Dan “valued his lost leg away above the one that is left. I am perfectly sure that if he had to part with either of them, he would part with the one that he has got.” Sickles took the town house at 23 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 9th Street, just up from Washington Square, and filled it with military memorabilia. His father died in 1887 and Dan became the executor of his estate, valued at more than $5 million. He would seem to be set for the rest of his life.

Into his seventies, eighties, and nineties he remained a busy and ubiquitous figure, frequently seen around town at gala dinners and first nights at the opera, involved in various civic committees, the old taint of scandal lingering but fading as he became a living monument to a bygone age, the memories of which he refused to let die. In 1890 he was elected sheriff of New York County. In 1893 he was elected to Congress one last time, where he pushed for veterans’ pensions and helped spearhead the successful move to have the Gettysburg battlefield made a national park—not least because it afforded him new opportunities to push his version of the battle. He was a familiar figure at gatherings of veterans, and he and General Longstreet, the Rebel who’d cost him his leg, became warm comrades—especially when Longstreet started telling anyone who’d listen that in moving out ahead of the Union line the way he had that day at Gettysburg, Sickles probably saved the day for the North, because he delayed Longstreet’s forces too long to capture Little Round Top. He neglected to say that if Sickles had not moved out in front, Little Round Top wouldn’t have been vulnerable in the first place. In 1897, Sickles was awarded a Medal of Honor for “conspicuous valor” at Gettysburg, which he felt fully vindicated him. Others did not and still do not. On Memorial Day 1904, Sickles and Oliver Howard, another former Union general, guided an excited President Theodore Roosevelt all around the battlefield sites of Gettysburg for several hours in pouring rain.

In 1906, Mark Twain was renting the town house across 9th Street from the general’s. He had not yet met him, but they had a mutual friend in Joseph Twichell. After the war, Twichell became a pastor in Hartford, Connecticut, and a well-known exponent of “muscular Christianity,” that Victorian blend of spiritual and physical health. Twain had met him in 1868, and by 1906 they were long and fast friends. It was Twichell who took Twain across the street to meet the general. Twain liked him well enough, although he was faintly disquieted at the way his rooms felt and smelled like a dowdy museum, and admitted dozing off more than once as the old warhorse droned on and on about himself and his escapades.

By 1912, Dan had blown through what his father left him, had narrowly escaped foreclosure on the town house, and was grouchily reduced to renting out the top two floors. On the third floor was an old Tammany pol, William “Plain Bill” Sulzer, who was elected governor that year. The following year, caught in a tangle of scandal and intrigue, he’d be impeached. Bringing things full circle, Mabel Dodge rented the second floor and began holding the weekly soirees, or “Evenings,” that made her the doyenne of Greenwich Village’s blossoming bohemian scene, which the Da Pontes probably would have enjoyed. She noted in her memoirs that the general once concluded a stiff but polite note to her declining an invitation with the words, “Written in the 93rd year of my life without the aid of spectacles.”

He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in May 1914. “Nobody with warm blood flowing through his veins can read the obituary notices of Gen. Sickles without a certain thrill of admiration,” the Times eulogized. “His was truly the adventurous spirit.” He got a grand funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a solemn procession in Washington, and a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The National Museum of Health and Medicine displays his leg bones to this day. At the Gettysburg national park that he helped to create, his monument, sited where he was wounded, is one of the smallest and plainest of any general officer’s. It was placed there during his lifetime. He claimed not to be offended by the apparent slight, declaring that the whole park was a monument to him anyway.