The Admiral and the Ambassador (7 page)

Words were spoken—unheard by all except those closest to the tomb—and tears were shed, then Grant's body was sealed into place. A polished red-cedar box stood in front of the open vault, and the workers gently placed the coffin inside. They closed the cedar box and slipped it inside a riveted sheet-iron case, which in turn was bolted inside another thick steel case, and then locked behind a wrought-iron gate decorated with a large
G.
It was hard to imagine that someone would try to steal the body, but the planners were taking no chances. Hours later, police were still herding mourners in a fast-moving line past the monument for a glimpse through the closed iron gate. Elsewhere the streets teemed with people, the funeral having turned into a somber citywide party—a fitting tribute for a man known for his love of cigars and a good glass of whisky.

At the time of the burial, the Grant Monument Association had received $37,000 in donations for the permanent tomb. Over the next few days, the amount jumped to nearly $70,000 as New Yorkers responded with a sense of patriotism and nostalgia for its larger-than-life link to the nation's darkest hours. Then life went on; the campaign faltered. A year after Grant's death, the fund for the permanent monument was stalled at $106,000, far short of the $500,000 needed to build the granite-and-marble mausoleum being designed by John H. Duncan. (He would later also design the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.) Duncan had a magisterial vision. The monument base was to be ninety feet on each side, with a seventy-foot-wide stairway on the south leading to an entrance sheltered by a portico held up by a double row of six tall, grooved columns. The heart of the building would be a squared room rising more than seventy feet above the ground, topped by a cornice and a parapet that held a pyramid-shaped cupola topping out at 150 feet. Inside the main room would be arches and a paneled dome ceiling, artworks depicting Grant's life, and the tomb itself, sealed shut behind double bronze doors.

Yet it almost didn't happen. In 1891, six years after Grant died, the association decided that, with $150,000 raised, it had enough money to start work. The base, it estimated, would cost $100,000, and if the rest of the money didn't come in to complete the project, the work would stop there. The former president and war hero would be entombed, essentially, inside a massive square. It was a pragmatic solution, but the lagging donations, and the willingness to abandon the original plan, became an embarrassment both to the city and to Grant's friends. Questions were whispered about who might be to blame. A shake-up ensued as the association's top officers resigned.

Porter had been a member of the board of directors, and he became increasingly agitated about the lack of progress and the disorder within the association. He viewed Grant not only as a pivotal figure in American history but also as a personal friend. Porter took control of the Grant Monument Association in the spring of 1892. He re-energized the fundraising, pulling strings with his colleagues at the elite Union League Club, of which he would become president the next year. And he picked up some help from an unexpected quarter: a Chicago wheeler-dealer named Edward F. Cragin.

An active Republican who had opposed Grant's attempt for a third run for the presidency in 1880, Cragin wrote to Porter in February 1893 with an unconventional offer. He would travel to Manhattan at his own cost and undertake to raise the rest of the money for the monument. If he failed, the Grant Monument Association would owe him nothing. If he succeeded, the association could pay him whatever it thought his help was worth. Porter, through his railroad connections (particularly at Pullman, whose executives knew Chicago well) checked into Cragin, decided he wasn't a charlatan—he had been involved in raising money for the World's Columbian Exposition, which was then being built in south Chicago—and figured the association had nothing to lose. A few weeks later, Cragin was in New York.
⁴

The fundraising schemes were simple, if labor intensive. Cragin was told not to approach the wealthy patrons who had already been tapped. Porter had recently expanded the association's board of directors to one hundred people, which also expanded the list of those with vested—and reputational—interest in seeing that the money was raised. Cragin, meanwhile, compiled a list of the city's trade associations, then persuaded their leaders to convene membership meetings at which Porter, Cragin, and others would make the case for the monument fund. Porter himself delivered more than one hundred such appeals. As they exhausted the trade associations, Cragin sold limited-edition illustrations of the monument's design, persuaded theaters to host benefits, and placed collection boxes at mass transit stations.

The stalled fund drive caught fire once again, and renewed public interest turned it into a citywide cause. By June, the association had met its goal of $500,000. It paid Cragin $4,000, and he faded into the back-ground.
⁵
The construction began in earnest, using tons of white granite from a quarry near North Jay, Maine, for the exterior and imported white marble for the inside walls and floor. Still, it wasn't until April 27, 1897, five years after Porter took over and a dozen years after Grant's death and first burial, that the general's body reached its final resting place. The ordeal was, in retrospect, a harbinger.

Grant Day dawned with the rawness of early spring. The thermometer was at 41 degrees, and it wouldn't rise much higher than that. Thick, high clouds scudded across the sky, whipped by winds that at the ground level snapped flags and tore at paper bunting. Decorations were shredded, and a cloth roof over the speakers' seats blew away. The wind even stripped the petals from roses woven into decorations on the monument itself. A few hardy people staked out their places for hours against the cold, waiting for the parade to pass. Some held newspapers on the windward sides of their bodies; others pressed horse blankets into service as cloaks. Bars and restaurants hummed as havens for parade watchers who decided to eat and drink in warmth until the parade neared.

President McKinley and his entourage—his family, his vice president, his cabinet, and a retinue of ambassadors—had arrived the afternoon before aboard a special Pennsylvania Railroad train. They spent the night at the opulent, seven-story Windsor Hotel at the corner of East Forty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, where the president's brother, Abner, lived with his family. (The building would burn to the ground two years later, killing forty-five people and leaving forty-one people missing and presumably lost in the rubble; the Abner McKinleys escaped.)

Porter arrived at the Windsor Hotel the next day shortly after 8:30 A
M,
joined by Mayor Strong. They emerged a half hour later with McKinley and joined him in his open-top, barouche-style carriage for the horse-drawn ride to the monument site. Other carriages followed, and as they traveled north, led by police on horseback, they were joined near Thirty-Second Street by carriages filled with the Grant family and other dignitaries. The gathering crowds cheered as the cavalcade trotted past, and McKinley, Porter, and Strong received particularly loud shouts of support as they clattered past the five-story Union League Club (Porter was the president) at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street. As they neared the Nineties, where the island rises, strengthening winds whipped the top hat from McKinley's head, though he caught it before it could fly away, and the men rode the rest of the way with their heads ducked to the wind, hands ready to snatch their brims.

At the monument, McKinley gave up on the hat, and greeted former president Grover Cleveland and others already in place near the steps. It
would be a long day. A nearby tent offered shelter, and the guests of honor lunched there and marked time as the parade, led by a platoon of mounted police, the Governors Island military band, and the Nez Percé chief Joseph, the last of the rebellious tribal chiefs, began the slow march northward up the spine of Manhattan. The parade began at 10:30 A
M
but didn't reach the monument until after 4:30 P
M.
The wind was unforgiving, stealing away music sheets from band members and spooking a horse, which fell, severely injuring the soldier who was riding it. Some sixty thousand marchers took part, and an estimated one million people lined the route and filled Riverside Park. The crowd was content to stand; entrepreneurs who invested in building bleachers couldn't fill the seats, despite heavy price discounts the day of the parade, and the half-empty grandstands rose like islands amid the sea of cheering people.

The dedication itself was brief. Grant's body had been moved into the tomb more than a week earlier and the temporary crypt razed, accenting the organizers' desire to hold a celebration, not a funeral. After a prayer by Bishop Newman, Grant's former pastor, McKinley spoke for a few minutes, congratulating New York on the scale and grandeur of the monument. He pointed out that while the Civil War had torn America apart, the nation had come back together. And while the men involved in that brutal convulsion were dying away, many, such as Grant, would be long remembered. “A great life never dies,” McKinley said, his words whipped away by the wind as the naval flotilla bobbed at anchor in the white-capped river. “Great deeds are imperishable; great names immortal…. With Washington and Lincoln, Grant has an exalted place in history and the affections of the people. Today his memory is held in equal esteem by those whom he led to victory, and by those who accepted his generous terms of peace.”

Then Porter spoke, delivering in essence a lengthy eulogy for his friend and former boss.

There is a source of extreme gratification and a profound significance in the fact that there are in attendance here not only the soldiers who fought under the renowned defender of the Union cause, but the leaders of armies who fought against him, united in testifying to the esteem and respect which he commanded from friend and foe alike. This grateful duty which we discharge this day is not unmixed with
sadness, for the occasion brings vividly to mind the fatal day on which his generous heart ceased to beat, and recalls the grief which fell upon the American people with a sense of pain which was akin to the sorrow of a personal bereavement. And yet it is not an equal occasion for tears, not a time to chant requiems or display the sable draperies of public mourning. He who lies with the portals of yonder tomb is not a dead memory. He is a living reality.”

When Porter finished, he formally turned over the monument to Mayor Strong, who spoke for a few minutes; the speakers retired briefly to the food tent before moving on to the parade reviewing stand, and then to a quick meal at the Claremont Restaurant. Afterward, McKinley, Porter, and other dignitaries made their way on foot to West 129th Street and then down steps to a river pier where the presidential yacht, the USS
Dolphin,
was tied up. They steamed out onto the river where they were greeted by cannon salutes from the warships and horn blasts from the working and pleasure craft. The
Dolphin
returned its own volley of a 21-gun salute and began moving south with the current as McKinley reviewed the gathered warships, which included the USS
Maine
and two Spanish warships, the
Infanta Maria Teresa
and the
Infanta Isabel.
Nine months later, the
Maine
would explode and sink in Havana harbor, ushering in the Spanish-American War, which would dominate Porter's first year as ambassador to France. The
Infanta Maria Teresa
would be heavily damaged in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, and the
Infanta Isabel
would be the only Spanish warship engaged in the hundred-day confrontation to emerge unscathed.

After the tour, the
Dolphin
docked at a pier at West Fifty-Second Street, where McKinley and Porter boarded a carriage back to the Windsor Hotel, arriving a little before seven o'clock, for a short rest. A couple of hours later they arrived together at a gala at the Union League building, which they had passed to such cheers on their way to the monument. As the rich and powerful dined and danced late into the night, bonfires ringed by the less wealthy burned along the bluff at Riverside Park, overlooking the lighted ships twinkling out on the river.