Ulysses S. Grant, by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

Ulysses S. Grant, Eighteenth President of the United States, (1869-1873; 1873-1877). Born Point Pleasant, Ohio, April 27, 1822, died Mt. McGregor, N.Y., July 23, 1885. The following is quoted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"Nature endowed General Grant with what Guizot calls the genius of common sense. Perhaps his most prominent traits were his persistence of purpose and action, his magnanimity and kindness of heart. As an American commander he had no equal. His sledge-hammer blows were given with all his strength, and he was always a fighter. He had the gravity of all great fighters.*** Grant's unflinching courage was sublime, his stout heart never quailed under the most alarming conditions. He excelled in that coolness of judgement which Napoleon described as "the foremost quality in a general." He possessed a constantly increasing comprehension of grand strategy and the proper movements and care of vast armies extending over a front of more than two thousand miles. He constantly pressed forward with indomitable will.*** Grant detested war, and looked with contempt at political systems which had not yet invented anything better than gunpowder for the arbitrament of international disputes.*** On his deathbed, when no longer able to speak, Grant wrote: "I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federals and Confederates. I can not stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy, but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seems to me to be the beginning of the answer, "Let us have peace.'" The magnificent tomb in the nation's metropolis, to which the hero's remains were removed a few days before the seventy-fith anniversary of his birth, bears on its granite front the appropriate legend, "Let us have peace."

"It has been asserted with much plausibility that no man in history has been looked upon by as many eyes as General Grant--from the field where he commanded more than a million men, to the presidential chair for two terms, and then through a "royal progress" around the world, during which it has been estimated that he was seen by between six and seven million of people. It may be reasonably doubted if any illustrious man, and certainly no American except Lincoln, has been looked upon in death by so many sorrowing people as gazed upon Grant. And it may with reasonable certainty be believed that his tomb will for all time be a place of pilgrimage for his countrymen, and will be visited by larger numbers than the grave of any other great man, not excepting those of Napoleon and Nelson."--JAMES GRANT WILSON, Life of Grant in Great Commander Series, D. Appleton & Company.