Photo of the Day: General Thomas Bust, Grant’s Tomb, NYC

The Battle of Nashville, concluded 150 years ago today, also ended, for all intents and purposes, any significant opposition to the Union cause in the Western theater of operations. Within a week, William Tecumseh Sherman would finish his legendary “March to the Sea” in Savannah, and by the following spring Robert E. Lee would be surrendering at Appomattox.

I wrote about this decisive battle five years ago, so I direct your attention to this prior post about this campaign. But I find that there’s still more to be said about the victorious general at Nashville, George H. Thomas.

In a way, this bust of the general, which I photographed while visiting Grant’s Tomb last spring, is symptomatic of the fate of this neglected Union commander in the Civil War. Had he chosen to cast his lot with his native Virginia, you would undoubtedly see beautifully preserved equestrian statues all over the South erected in his memory, as friend and fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee has at Washington and Lee University and on Monument Avenue in Richmond.

Instead, Thomas languishes largely as an afterthought in the North. Sure, there is an equestrian statue—some say, the finest—in Washington, D.C., erected in his memory, in 1879. But the thousands of daily motorists in Thomas Circle are too busy to think about the hero commemorated by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward.

Aside from that, what do you have? In Grant’s Tomb, this bust, one of five in the dark crypt surrounding the sarcophagi of Ulysses S. Grant and wife Julia carved by two artists employed by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, Jeno Juszko and William Mues. These figures were the commander in chief’s key lieutenants in the war: Thomas, Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, James B. McPherson, and Edward Ord. Over the years, the federal government has been so unmindful of the man who helped make sure that there even remained a federal government that they had to be shamed into preserving his tomb. Why should subsidiary figures such as Thomas deserve better?

In Thomas’ case, because he risked even more than his life to save the Union: he put on the line his posthumous reputation. In its zeal for the Lost Cause, the postwar South honored men far less able than this Virginian, all because they could not forgive him. Even his sisters broke off ties with him, from the outbreak of the war and even until his death in 1870.

Thomas was treated even more shabbily in the North. While acknowledging the stubborn courage that gave him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” Grant and Sherman left him with an undeserved reputation as strictly a superior defensive commander. In fact, as Ernest B. Furgurson related in a March 2007 article for Smithsonian Magazine, Thomas was a master of logistics and organization.

From the American Revolution to the War on Terror, American soldiers have paid the price for vainglorious commanders who squandered their men’s blood too easily. Thomas was a conspicuous exception. As the sesquicentennial remembrance of the Civil War winds down, the accomplishments of this intelligent, loyal and brave general should be celebrated far more often.

Photo of the Day: Grant’s Tomb, NYC

Two weeks ago, while walking around Riverside Park, I made it a point to stop at Grant’s Tomb, and snapped as many photographs as I could in my short time there. When I read, then, that the 192^nd anniversary of the birth of the Civil War general and postwar President would be held today, I was disappointed I couldn’t make it. But I knew that this post, with this photo, would be all the more appropriate, even necessary.

I was glad to see, in mid-afternoon of that gloriously sunny spring day, that this massive structure, still the largest mausoleum in North America, had attracted a steady, if not enormous, stream of visitors. It wasn’t always this way.

Dedicated in 1897, with diplomats from 26 countries in attendance, the tomb of Ulysses S.Grant and his wife Julia Dent Grant had fallen into disrepair nearly a century later. Meanwhile, in Lexington, Va., the tomb of Robert E. Lee and his family had been kept in immaculate condition. The contrast was glaring and scandalous: the history-haunted South honored Lee's life enough to maintain his final resting place with pride, while the man who defeated him—and saved the Union in the process—had been forgotten by the North that benefited from his undaunted courage.

That was the state of affairs until some two decades ago, when a Columbia University law student and part-time tour guide Frank Scaturro took matters into his own hands, after his pleas to the National Park Service to maintain the site had been ignored. The resulting story in The Philadelphia Inquirer angered Grant’s descendants, who threatened to transfer the remains of Ulysses and Julia back to Illinois. The National Park Service then devoted $1.8 million to restoring the memorial, providing for its upkeep, and increasing security monitoring, with the site rededicated in 1997 for its centennial.

“Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” is, as some people think, a trick question, though for the wrong question. It’s not that people other than the President and First Lady are there; rather, it’s that the two of them are not, technically speaking, buried. This being a mausoleum, it’s more correct to say they are entombed here.

After entering the circular gallery inside the memorial, you behold their remains from above, as they rest in twin red granite sarcophagi in an open crypt. (Five busts in niches around the coffins—of Grant lieutenants William Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas, James McPherson, and Edward Ord—were added by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.) The design was based on another classically inspired one across the Atlantic, Les Invalides in Paris, for another common soldier who became one of history’s most innovative generals.

There was, of course, a rather large difference between the two, and it’s spelled out just below the circular dome atop the building: “Let us have peace,” Grant's 1868 campaign slogan--a reminder that he sought to reunite the two sections after the conflict, rather than, like Napoleon, embroil a continent in bloodshed for a generation. 

A number of the explanatory panels around the site implicitly refute the notion that Grant was one of the worst U.S. Presidents. In fact, before the mid-20^th century, no President besides Abraham Lincoln moved so decisively to uphold the rights of African-Americans as Grant. The so-called “Reconstruction Amendments” to the Constitution, guaranteeing civil rights for the freedmen, were passed in his two terms. 

Grant wanted peace but with justice, and to ensure that result he used the federal government to crack down on the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. The gratitude of the freedmen can be seen in the fact that initial fundraising for the nation’s tribute to the man who saved it came from Richard T. Greener, the first African-American graduate of Harvard.  Greener liked to quote the motto of Grant, which serves as well for possibility of self-advancement in the country he loved as much as it did for his astonishing military career: Odon eureso a poieso (I will find a way or make one).

Quote of the Day (Ulysses S. Grant, on His Simple But Grand Ancestry)

“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”—Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885-1886)

The Civil War defined irrevocably what it meant to be American. Characteristically, the man who more than any other was responsible for winning the conflict set out the theme of his own life with this opening line. The statement does not beg to become an aphorism, but like the tone of the rest of the book, it is steady and winning. Its glow of quiet pride is unmistakable. Above all, it is credible—a fact lost on Larry McMurtry, who reviewed Bill Clinton’s My Life favorably in contrast with that of the man the novelist condescendingly called “dear, dying General Grant’s.”

Ulysses S. Grant was born on this date in 1822. Nearly 12 years after his death, on what would have been his 75^th birthday, over 1 million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of his tomb—the largest in North America--in New York. Over the next century, this mausoleum, funded by 90,000 donors and modeled on one of the ancient wonders of the world, would be allowed to deteriorate disgracefully—a situation in direct contrast to the final resting place of Grant’s great adversary, Robert E. Lee, in Lexington, Va. (The Confederacy might have lost, but die-hard adherents to the Lost Cause knew how to preserve their sacred monuments.)

It took the vigorous efforts of a Columbia University student, Frank Scaturro—and a threat by the general’s descendants to relocate his remains and those of wife Julia elsewhere, where they could be taken better care of—for the National Park Service to provide, in time for the centennial of the tomb's dedication, a necessary $1.8 million facelift for a site that at one point had more visitors than the Statue of Liberty. Every one of those dollars was well-spent, considering the general's enormous service to his country. When he was dying and working desperately to complete his memoirs, a stranger sent him a $500 check with an attached note: “'General, I owe you this for Appomattox.''

(By the way, though the 1997 work helped, much of the area around Grant’s Tomb remains badly in need of repair, as frankly acknowledged on its Web site.)

Grant produced his Personal Memoirs under harrowing circumstances, trying to rescue his family from the bankruptcy into which he had been plunged a couple of years earlier by an unscrupulous business partner. (That was another thing that makes him especially American to us: his Wall Street brokerage firm was fleeced by a swindler.) He completed it only four days before he succumbed to cancer, and during much of the writing he refused medication that would dull the pain but leave him too mentally groggy to write. His publisher, Mark Twain, compared the book favorably with Caesar’s Commentaries.

Edmund Wilson must have had in mind the opening line—and many others—when he wrote:

“Grant's Memoirs are a unique expression of the national character... The book conveys Grant's dynamic force and the definitiveness of his personality. Perhaps never has a book so objective in form seemed so personal in every line. The tempo is never increased, but the narrative, once we get into the war, seems to move with the increasing momentum that the soldier must have felt in the field. Somehow, despite its sobriety, it communicates the spirit of the battles themselves and makes it possible to understand how Grant won them.”