Report on the Grant Bicentennial at Grant’s Tomb Keynote by Grant Biographer Brooks Simpson

Today was the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant. While I am recovering from a life- threatening illness, I decided that I would travel to Manhattan to Harlem to join the Bicentennial at Grant’s Tomb. If you have not visited the site in the 21st Century, you will find a beautifully landscaped and maintained mausoleum of impressive proportions unlike any other in the United States. Grant had extensive connections to New York City and the good regard he enjoyed here in the 19th Century was reflected in the large crowd that gathered at his and his wife Julia’s final resting place.

The day’s events began with the presentation of the colors by the West Point Honor Guard. Grant is perhaps the most famous alumnus of the military university and the academy was well represented by cadets, staff, and graduates who came to pay tribute to him.

Cadets led the audience in singing the National Anthem.

 

Savona Bailey-McCain, of the West Harlem Art Fund, was introduced as the Master of Ceremonies. She served as an enthusiastic guide for the hundreds gathered to the day’s events.

West Point Chaplain Father Matt Pawlikowski, a West Point graduate and a Catholic priest, gave the invocation, and a proclamation from the State of Colorado honoring Grant was read. Grant had played a key role in the territory’s becoming a state in 1876, the Centennial Year of the United States.

Frank Scaturro, President of the Grant Monument Association, spoke next on Grant as “a Founding Father of our multiracial republic.” While he did not speak of his own role in preserving the monument, Scaturro had led the fight to restore the Tomb when he was a student at Columbia University. Scaturro grew up near me on Long Island and attended Chaminade Catholic High School, my alma mater.

Brooks Simpson at Grant’s Tomb today. 

Professor Brooks Simpson of Arizona State University delivered the Keynote Address. Simpson is the nation’s leading authority on Grant, and his work beginning in the 1990s led to a massive change in how historians interpret Grant. (Brooks Simpson also grew up near me on Long Island as well, by the way.)

While much of historian Simpson’s writing is about Grant as a military commander, today’s presentation examined how Grant’s military experience helped form him as a Reconstruction figure and president. Simpson told the audience of over three hundred that “Most people know of Ulysses S. Grant as the general who led the United States to victory in the American Civil War, that should be enough. Yet there is more to Grant than that.”

Simpson continued, “In some ways Grant found peace more challenging than war. Victory not only saved the Union and destroyed slavery, but it also secured for him the personal security he had sought for so long. Yet over the next four years he found himself embroiled in political controversy as he sought to preserve in peace what he had won in war by repressing recalcitrant white Southerners’ violent resistance to Black freedom.”

According to the historian, Grant had not aspired to become president. His fame and family security would come through continued service at the highest level of military command. However, as Grant told William T. Sherman, if he did not run for office, the future of the American Republic at this dangerous moment would be left to “mere trading politicians.” When Grant received the nomination of the Republican Party for the presidency, he responded with the words carved over his Tomb’s entrance: “Let us have Peace.” By this he meant not only peace between North and South, but also between Black and White. He wanted to forge ahead, said Simpson, and leave the terrorism and disorder of the Civil War and the first years of Reconstruction behind. This, Simpson reminds us, was a sentiment “coming from the last slaveholder” to serve as President of the United States. “Such statements,” said Simpson, “reminded everyone of how far we had come in a decade.”

Grant wanted Blacks to have a “Fair Chance” said Simpson, and Grant urged whites to “treat the ‘Negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain.” Despite Grant’s best efforts to subdue violence, however, Simpson said, “it ultimately prevailed.”

Ulysses Grant Dietz speaking at ceremony.

After Simpson’s well-received Keynote, President Grant’s Great Grandson, Ulysses Grant Dietz spoke about his experience of being one of the more than seventy of Grant’s great grandchildren. He said that as a boy in the 1960s, he was more likely to be made fun of because of his ancestor than asked questions about him. This was the period when Lost Cause versions of the Civil War were still predominant in much of America.  Within his own family, Grant was mostly seen as a loving family man, and little discussed as a president. It was only as an adult that Dietz studied his 1860s namesake. He said that the work of scholars like Simpson and Scaturro helped him understand the difficult life of the general and president and his remarkable achievement. Grant went from being a clerk in a business to president of the United States is a decade!

After the presentations, three wreaths were presented, including one from President Biden. A rifle salute was given and taps were played. Reverend Jacques DeGraff of the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem offered the benediction and the colors were retired.

 

Many went into the Tomb to observe the sarcophagi of Ulysses S. Grant and his beloved wife Julia. As Simpson told the audience, Grant was proud of his achievement as a soldier and president, but he found happiness in the love of his wife and children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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