Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth President of the United States and commanding general of the Union Army, died at Mount McGregor, New York, on July 23, 1885. He was sixty-three. Throat cancer had taken the voice; he finished the memoirs in a cottage on the mountain, writing against the clock so that Julia would not be left poor after a bank partner's collapse. Born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822, he was a mediocre peacetime officer, a failed farmer and store clerk, and then the general Lincoln needed. He accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox with terms that looked forward: parole, horses for the spring planting, no theatrical humiliation. As president he defended Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment when much of his party was already tired, and his administrations were stained by other men's graft he was slow to see. He was loyal past the point of wisdom. The book he finished in the last year still reads like a man who disliked fuss and did the work. New York built the tomb on Riverside Drive, a dome the city can see from the river. Mount McGregor was the death place, a rented quiet. This memorial names New York as the register city because that is where the country put the monument. The memoirs remain the clearer grave. He had been a clerk in Galena when the war found him, and he never quite lost the clerk's habit of finishing the paper in front of him. Julia wore the widow's income the book earned. Riverside Drive made a general into architecture. Mount McGregor was only a cottage and a deadline.