Who Is Buried in Grant's Tomb?

By LANCE MORROW

Ulysses Grant sat on the porch and marched armies across his memory. He called them up through cocaine and morphine, through the pain in his throat, and into a perfect clarity of prose. He fought the war minutely all over again: Shiloh and Vicksburg, the slaughters of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, where men were so sure of death that they pinned their names and addresses on their jackets for easy identification when they fell. And at last, the mythy set piece of Appomattox, where Lee came as the elegant last cavalier, and Grant, a shabby cigar stub of a man, appeared in dusty blues open at the throat, one button in the wrong hole, no sword, to embody the victory of some other American principle.

Grant remembered it all on the porch of a cottage at Mount McGregor in the foothills of the Adirondacks in the summer of 1885, 100 years ago. He was dying of cancer. As he sat in a silk top hat, reassembling the past, tourists came to stare at him from a little distance. He let them watch, even wanted them to. So many planes of the public and the private intersected in Grant: the obscure American failure who saved the Union. Now, at the last, the shabby embarrassment who was also the first genius of industrial warfare made the intimate business of his dying a sort of public spectacle. Grant harbored complications. If he was of all men the typical American, as his friend William Tecumseh Sherman thought, the incendiary of Atlanta also admitted, "I do not understand him, and I do not believe he understands himself." That was the oddness of Grant. In Hannah Arendt's phrase, Adolf Eichmann represented "the banality of evil." In a way, Grant represented the banality of a momentary greatness. Or perhaps the mysterious possibilities of the ordinary.

In the Mount McGregor drama, terminal and succinct, there was a sleazy commercial dimension that savored of the scandals of his White House years. The owners of the resort at Mount McGregor had actually attracted Grant to come and die in comfort there, a sort of publicity stunt. Grant went along with it. But as he enacted that odd humiliation, he was, in the privacy of his mind and on his lined note pad, composing his memoirs, one of the strongest and purest documents of American public life.

Ulysses Grant eventually receded to become a haunting half mystery of American life. Down the generations he has stayed cocooned, in memory, in a stoical mediocrity. H.L. Mencken said Grant was the kind of man who would say to someone he encountered, "Meet the wife." He possessed an eerie philistine equilibrium, remarking once that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. What stuck mostly in memory as the decades passed were the shabby things: the scandals and swindles and, ignominiously, the talk about his drinking. He did drink too much now and then, when he was depressed, and especially when he was away from the stabilizing influence of his wife Julia, whom he adored.

What puzzles is Grant's sudden greatness, his rising to the occasion, and the brutality of his greatness, what might be called the bloody abstraction of it. It was as if Grant had rescinded some logic of cause and effect. Lincoln's best generals failed: refulgent characters like George McClellan and "Fighting Joe" Hooker, who would not fight. Grant, the failure, succeeded. Down the years, if anyone has bothered to think about Grant, he has had to wonder whether the man was a genius (his native genius hidden till the crucial moment) or a nonentity who blundered into momentary success, who arrived at immortality by accident. Ronald Reagan is a leader of totally different temperament and tailoring, but one sometimes hears the same puzzlement over his luck and political successes. In this comparison of qualifications, acting in Hollywood is the moral equivalent of selling cordwood in St. Louis or clerking in Galena, Ill., as Grant did before the war.

As his death approached, Grant wrote a note to his physician that contained a subtle and accurate conceit: "The fact is that 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 signify all three." What Grant said about his dying was true of his life. It was only as a verb, that is, as a warrior, that he found focus. Grant had an animal sense of moment and motion. Mary Lincoln thought for a time during the siege of Richmond that Grant was a mere "butcher," and most of the North agreed. But he was a far better soldier than that. He could march strategies across a landscape the way a cat can walk across a dressing table laden with perfume bottles, never looking at his hind legs and never spilling a drop. That is too delicate an image, maybe. Grant spilled a generation or so of blood. Still, he could move armies the way the cat moves its feet, on true instinct, completely self-possessed.

Perhaps if there is something haunting about Grant's life, it is the way that, having achieved military greatness and two terms in the White House, he lapsed toward failure again. He became a parable of the unreliability of American dreams. The American trajectory was supposed to be always ascendant. Grant swooped down, and up, and down again.

And then, at the last, in greatest torment, he launched himself into eternity by producing a work of enduring literature, a parting labor of memory and language from the man of pure action. Mount McGregor was a kind of archetype of American retrospection: recollection performed as heroic deed. Improbably, Grant became the greatest of the rememberers of a war so morally and dramatically fascinating that Americans have returned to it ever since, generation after generation, as if to a text of inexhaustible meaning.

The Civil War was fought to expunge the American original sin (slavery) and to save the dream and the power. It was all of Homer and Shakespeare come to the New World. It was the American discovery of tragedy, and of modern death, proceeding from the jaunty, clumsy toy soldiering of First Bull Run to Sherman's scorched earth and Grant's trench slaughter, which were a moral preview of the 20th century.

The Rumanian scholar Mircea Eliade made the distinction between a people's "profane time" and its "sacred time." In sacred time, he thought, deeds done in historical time partake of the permanence of myth. In his dying hours on Mount McGregor, Grant labored to transport the Civil War, and himself, into sacred time. The war arrived there intact. Grant, however, has remained in a dusk somewhere between myth and Galena, Ill.