General Grant Memorial – the Largest Mausoleum in North America

General Grant Memorial, the largest mausoleum in North America, is the final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia.

Ulysses Grant commanded the victorious Union army during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and served two terms as the 18th U.S. president from 1869 to 1877.

When the war wasn’t going well for the North, Lincoln appointed Grant to head the Union Army, who led it to victory. Even though some victories, like in the battle of Shiloh, came at the cost of tremendous loss of life and the fact that Grant was known to drink heavily, he was loved and highly popular.

Unlike his predecessors, who saw the military objectives of the Civil War as capturing territory, Grant believed that overpowering the Confederate army was crucial to achieving victory. Grant hunted down Lee’s army until Lee’s complete surrender, marking the end of the Civil War. Grant did not take Lee’s men prisoners, allowing them to return home – quite a remarkable gesture.

After the Civil War was over, Ulysses Grant, a national hero, was nominated for president in 1868 by the Republican Party. Ulysses Grant served two terms as president and settled in New York City afterward. He was a much better general than an investor loosing all his life savings after investing in a brokerage firm that went bankrupt. He spent his final days working on his memoirs, written by Mark Twain. The memoirs were published to critical acclaim in 1885, the year Grant died of throat cancer.

Approximately 90,000 people donated over $600,000 towards the construction of Grant’s Tomb, making it the largest public fundraising effort at that time. The dedication ceremony of Grant’s Tomb, designed by architect John Duncan, on April 27, 1897 attracted over one million people!