Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [35]
When the disease permanently silenced verbal communication, Grant scrawled a poignantly humorous note to his doctors. “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I think I signify all three.”
Nor did this marvelous Victorian melodrama end with Grant’s death on July 23, 1885. Too many old soldiers had too much invested in their commander’s glory, and glorification, to consign him to a temporary vault on 122nd Street. Hard times slowed the effort to build a shrine worthy of the Union’s military savior, as did a rival campaign to install the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal in New York harbor.
In 1890, the Senate passed a bill to remove Grant’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery, a step staunchly opposed by the general’s widow, Julia. Whatever their motive, the lawmakers succeeded in prodding New York’s dilatory fundraisers. On April 27, 1897, Grant’s seventy-fifth birthday, a million people lined the streets of Manhattan to watch aging warriors of the Grand Army of the Republic and ambassadors from twenty-seven nations join President McKinley in dedicating the largest mausoleum in America.
Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia lie side by side in Grant’s mammoth marble tomb
To the novelist Henry James, Grant’s Tomb symbolized “democracy in the all together…an unguarded shrine where all could come and go at their own will.” Inside, beneath mosaics depicting his martial triumphs, the general and his lady lie in twin ten-ton sarcophogi carved from Wisconsin porphyry, Julia having rejected the idea of a single monument. “General Grant must have his own sarcophagus, and I must have mine beside him,” she explained. “Hereafter when persons visit this spot, they must be able to say ‘here rests General Grant.’” If his presidency, crooked as a dog’s hind leg, tarnished Grant’s historical standing, it certainly hadn’t diminished his hold on popular affections.
—RNS
Rutherford B. Hayes
Buried: Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio
Nineteenth President - 1877-1881
Born: October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio
Died: 11:00 p.m. on January 17, 1893, in Fremont, Ohio
Age at death: 70
Cause of death: Heart attack
Final words: “I know I am going where Lucy is.”
Admission to Hayes Presidential Center: $7.50
The disputed election of 1876 caused a near-rebellion when a fifteen-man Congressional commission, created to sort out electoral vote fraud, awarded the White House to Rutherford B. Hayes in a party-line vote. It earned Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, the derisive nickname “His Fraudulency.”
Hayes had promised not to seek a second term. In March 1881, he attended the inauguration of his successor, James Garfield, and happily left Washington for retirement in his native Ohio. The Hayes’s new life got off to an inauspicious start: the train in which they were traveling crashed, leaving two other passengers dead. Rutherford and Lucy Hayes were unhurt and continued the trip to Fremont and the home they had named Spiegel Grove.
In 1889, the much-admired Lucy Hayes suffered a series of strokes and died. The couple had been very close and Hayes wrote in his diary, “The charm of life left me when Lucy died.” He busied himself with public affairs, including service as a trustee of Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University.
In January of 1893, Hayes sat in a drafty train car en route to a university trustees meeting. Chilled, he felt ill throughout the meeting; at the station on his return to Fremont, Hayes suffered a heart attack.
Despite the concern of others, Hayes downed some brandy to restore his spirits and boarded the train for home. There, his doctor ordered the former president to his bed and for a while,