The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  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 AM, 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 AM but didn’t reach the monument until after 4:30 PM. 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 mour
ning. 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.

  The Porters arose early on the morning of May 5 and, after a last-minute flurry of packing, rode by carriage from their Madison Avenue home to the long row of commercial wharfs along Manhattan’s West Street, the wide, bricked boulevard hugging the North River, as the lower part of the Hudson was called at the time. The wharfs, which opened under large roofs to the street, were among the newest additions to New York’s commercial hub, with local ferries connecting to New Jersey, less than a mile across the river, and large ocean liners linking America to the rest of the world. It was a Wednesday morning, cooled by a steady wind sweeping down from the Hudson River Valley, but with clear skies promising a nice day. The fair weather helped build the crowd, and despite the early hour the piers along West Street were swarming with workers, passengers, and well-wishers seeing friends and relatives off on trips. The Porters’ carriage fought its way through crisscrossing traffic of passenger coaches, scurrying pedestrians, and teamsters hauling heavy loads of barrels, crates, and the occasional steel beam.6

  The Porters alit in front of the American Line dock at Pier 14, at the western foot of Fulton Street. The pier, only five years old, was a massive 125 feet wide. An ornate three-story facade hid a two-story, iron-framed barn of a building extending 720 feet out over the water on thick wooden pilings driven deep in the river bottom. A huge AMERICAN LINE sign ran the length of the roof ridge, easily visible from beyond the Hoboken Ferry dock to the north and the Jersey City Ferry dock to the south. On this morning, though, it was hidden on the south side by the two-year-old steamship St. Paul, whose forecastle was about the same height as a six-story building, with fore and aft funnels jutting even higher. As the Porters arrived, the funnels were spewing streams of smoke into morning sky in preparation for the 10 AM departure of one of its biweekly trips to Southampton, England.

  The St. Paul was one of eight steamships to leave New York that day; another eleven were putting into port.7 A true luxury liner, the St. Paul and its nearly identical sister ship, the St. Louis, were the largest US-registered ships on the seas. Built in Philadelphia by William Cramp and Sons, the St. Louis launched in October 1894, and the St. Paul was pushed into the water six months later. Both were sleek-looking despite their sizes, about 550 feet long and more than 60 feet wide. It took about $3 million and four thousand men to build each ship, with double-bottomed steel hulls, bulkheads to protect against sinking, and six wood-planked decks over steel beams.

  The St. Paul was built to move people as much as freight and could hold nearly 1,500 passengers, 320 of them in first-class staterooms on the main deck, 200 in second-class, and 900 in steerage. The first-class salon was large enough to hold all the first-class passengers at once beneath a large, domed ceiling, meant to resemble that of a ballroom in a luxury hotel. And the sister ships were fast. Each had made the crossing between New York and Southampton in six days. It was, at the time, the best ship America had to offer, and fitting for an ambassador’s trip to his overseas assignment.8

  As departure time neared, the hustle and bustle around Pier 14 picked up. Stevedores scurried about the street-level floor to load the last of the freight, luggage, and provisions aboard while, upstairs, passengers checked in then crossed a level gangplank to the ship’s main deck. It was an innovation of the relatively new pier “separating passengers from the dust and dirt that accompanied the loading of cargo and provisions.”9 Scores of well-wishers waved passengers aboard, and newspaper reporters buttonholed the best-known of the passengers for some final words to be duly noted in the papers’ next editions.

  The Porters had their own entourage of friends “who literally carried us on board the boat” and filled the family’s deck suite with flowers.10 The family was traveling in style: the top fare of $750 a head bought a suite with a private bath, toilet, bedroom, and sitting area. Porter’s daughter Elsie was caught up in the swirl of excitement. As the privileged child of a wealthy New Yorker, she had traveled by ship to Europe before on a yearlong sojourn with her mother. On that trip, she knew she would return to the United States. This was a trip without a set end. For a seventeen-year-old girl, it was to be a grand adventure and would prove to be a critical juncture in her life.

  As the family moved about the ship, other passengers called out Porter’s name, as did news reporters seeking a last thought from the new ambassador before they were ushered ashore. Porter was likely the best known of the ship’s passengers but hardly the only famous face. John K. Gowdy, an Indiana political bigwig who helped deliver the state’s electoral votes to McKinley, was aboard en route to Paris, where he would work with Porter as the consul general. The president’s cousin and political confidant William McKinley Osborne was sailing for London, where he also would serve as consul general, joining fellow passenger Richard Westacott of Boston, recently appointed vice consul. Colonel William H. Williams, a Treasury Department official, was also heading for Paris as an advance force in looming talks about an international approach to “bimetallism,” using both gold and silver to back up national currencies.

  Nongovernment people of note were aboard too, including Manton Marble, the owner and editor of the New York World newspaper during and after the Civil War. President Lincoln had ordered Marble imprisoned after the pro-slavery editor published an article in spring of 1864 based on a hoax letter that claimed Lincoln wanted to draft four hundred thousand men for the Union Army. (Soldiers occupied the newspaper offices for two days at the peak of the showdown.) In the decades after the war, Marble was an active Democrat, and President Cleveland had sent him on a tour of Europe to measure support for bimetallism. Marble was all but retired now and off to England, where he would live most of the rest of his life with his daughter and her husband.11 The St. Paul also was carrying Henry Dazian, whose family business was creating costumes for Manhattan stage productions. And cast members of the play Secret Service by William Gillette, which had just finished a critically acclaimed run at Garrick Theatre on West Thirty-Fifth Street, were settling into cabins on their way for a performance tour of England.12

  How many of his fellow passengers Porter knew before the voyage is unclear, but he likely was well acquainted with James D. Cameron, who was off to Europe with his wife after stepping down in March as US senator from Pennsylvania. Cameron also had served as President Gra
nt’s last war secretary, when Porter was Grant’s personal secretary. And while it was barely noted, William S. Cramp and his wife were aboard too. Cramp was head of engineering for his family’s shipbuilding firm in Philadelphia, which had built the St. Paul.

  One of the more intriguing figures aboard was Major General Nelson A. Miles. Like Porter, Miles was a Civil War hero. Where Porter moved into politics, Miles made a career of the military and went on to lead brutal pacification campaigns against Native Americans. Although he was not directly involved and later criticized the action, Miles’s troops were responsible for the 1890 massacre of more than 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee. Miles was born in rural Westminster, Massachusetts, about fifty miles west of Boston, and like many young men he entered the military with the outbreak of the Civil War. He became not only a military leader but also a military student who longed to witness some of the great armies of Europe in battle. That winter, tensions between Greece and Turkey over a Christian uprising in Crete turned into a military scuffle in February when Turkish ships shelled a Cretan village. Confrontations with Greek troops escalated, diplomats were recalled, and on April 17, Turkey declared war. Miles saw his chance, quickly packed his bags, and, accompanied by his aide (and future general) Marion P. Maus, he left Washington, DC, on May 4 to catch the sailing of the St. Paul the next day. It was a bit of a gamble, given the amount of time it would take to get to the war zone. He told a reporter as the St. Paul prepared to sail that he “would not be surprised to find on arriving in Europe that the Greco-Turkish war is over.” At the very least, he said, he could tour European capitals and get a sense of military policies.13