Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [82]
After we filed out of the cool vault, I usually asked my students to sit in front of the monument and jot their sentiments and reflections down in notebooks. There was something redemptive about visiting Lincoln’s tomb in a group, the way there is in worshipping together with one’s fellow man in church where all are temporarily free of earthly burdens. One former student, Jared Goldman, summed up the feeling nicely in his journal: “All around me is free air, free sight. Abraham Lincoln sought the freedom of all people. It is fitting for this site to give such a sense of freedom that I want to sing ‘America the Beautiful. O beautiful for spacious skies.’ I am here. This is America and more than just a place for the dead to lie. It is peace and freedom.”
Strolling around the towering oaks through the gently rolling landscape of Oak Ridge Cemetery prompts a reconciliation with the past, a sense that the blood at Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg was not spilled in vain, that perhaps there is something to the myth that Lincoln was divinely sent to heal our nation by leading it undaunted through the divisive crisis over slavery that nearly tore it asunder.
But this sentiment fades in wandering past the headstones of the ordinary Americans who are also buried within the Oak Ridge Cemetery’s lonely manicured grounds. There’s something disturbing in the reflection that one will never know what Betty Potter or Jackson Lemmings did with their lives, whether they spent childhood in the Illinois backwoods or raised families in Chicago when it was just a hamlet. There may be more than 30,000 volumes on the Civil War in the Library of Congress alone, but nearly all the folks buried in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s tomb will remain ever invisible to history. Yet they too played roles in our great national drama, and their ghosts also surely linger in Springfield at midnight alongside those of Lincoln and Lindsay.
In the end, however, cemeteries are for the living. Nearly all the dead presidents in Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? are interred in imposing mausoleums, some with eternal flames kept lit in their honor. This is a fine tradition—provided it doesn’t go too far. American presidents are not meant to be remembered with the grandeur accorded Egyptian pharaohs and French kings—our leaders rise not from royal pedigrees or dictatorial impulses but through hard work, patriotic conviction, and luck. Oak Ridge Cemetery is filled with Lindsay’s “Lincoln-hearted,” ordinary men and women with such an extraordinary belief in our great democratic experiment that it inspired them to build the United States into the strongest and freest nation in history. Thus it is that in some uniquely American way every grave at Oak Ridge seems as important as Lincoln’s in a country where citizenship is the highest honor of all.
Some years ago, during a sojourn at Princeton University, I decided to stroll around the local cemetery to visit the grave of Grover Cleveland, the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States—the only chief executive to serve non-consecutive terms and the only Democrat elected to the White House between James Buchanan in 1856 and Woodrow Wilson in 1912. I had always felt a certain fondness toward Cleveland, whose political career was characterized by commonsense conservatism and honesty in governance. It surprised me, therefore, that as I searched Princeton Cemetery for Cleveland’s grave I encountered not a single visitor there to pay their respects to this once towering political force. When I found the gravesite, I was further struck that there were no statues, no celebratory wreaths, no memorial bouquets