Plans suggesting this placement of memorials to the wartime President and his commanding general were included in the Senate Park Commission’s 1901 proposal to transform central Washington. Led by architect D.H. Burnham, the commission redesigned the picturesque parkland that then stretched from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument to create the National Mall, an expansive ceremonial space that would extend beyond the Obelisk onto land claimed from the Potomac’s tidal basin. The commission proposed that the Mall be bordered by new government buildings and that formal public spaces with monuments to Grant and Lincoln terminate its east and west ends.

With the dedication of these two monuments in 1922, the memory of the Civil War became the central feature of the national capital; however, these monuments have assumed vastly different roles in the public mind during the 20th century. While the Lincoln Memorial has risen to national prominence, the monument to Grant has fallen into obscurity.

The Lincoln Memorial is among Washington’s best known and most visited monuments, and it has achieved even greater stature through its place in popular culture, figuring prominently in television and film scenes, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and through its association with the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Its steps were the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I have a dream" speech during the 1963 march on Washington.

By contrast, the Grant Memorial never achieved the prominence its patrons and designers had envisioned for it. Planned to be the centerpiece of an American Place de la Concorde that never took shape around it, Grant’s memorial is dwarfed by the Capitol behind it and the Mall that stretches before it. In addition, a vast fan-shaped reflecting pool placed in front of the monument in 1970 has lessened its impact by limiting visitor access and views.

The public personae of Lincoln and Grant have undergone similar fates. Lincoln’s stature has grown throughout the past century. Grant’s place in the public realm has diminished from its high point, as represented by his mausoleum, which is the largest of any American’s, built in the late 1890s on New York’s Riverside Drive.

A closer look at the memorial that has remained relatively obscure to both visitors and native Washingtonians will help us to better understand both the monument and the cultural forces that helped to shape it.

In his monument to Grant, Shrady portrayed the general sitting solemnly astride his horse, while his cavalry and artillery charge into battle. In contrast to the calm commanding general, these massive sculptural groups provide a portrait of active warfare seen through the men, the horses, their equipment, the rugged terrain and the specter of hardship, pain and sudden death. Collectively, it is a memorial to Grant’s generalship and also a memorial to the troops he commanded.

This kind of visceral portrayal of warfare was not typical of the 27 designs that sculptors and architects submitted in competition for the Grant Memorial project -- nor was it typical of earlier Civil War memorials. If we consider monument design trends emerging by 1900 as expressions of prevailing cultural aspirations and fears, however, we see that this memorial was no aberration. The Grant Memorial shares a context with a growing genre of war memorials that embodied the nation’s changing ideas of the Civil War and its significance. Some of the first public Civil War monuments were built in cemeteries to foster popular remembrance of the soldiers who never came home. These were attempts to sculpt an American everyman who would represent all who had died.

The early memorial that more than any other helped determine the look of small-scale soldier monuments for years to come can be found at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Martin Milmore’s Roxbury Soldiers’ Monument, also called the Citizen Soldier, was dedicated on the first Decoration Day in 1868. It depicts a Union soldier resting on a rifle in solemn contemplation of those buried in the cemetery lot below him.

Whether or not they were built in cemeteries, early monuments mourned the dead and, at least in the north, celebrated, in a solemn and reserved manner, a nation reunited.

One of the best of these, the Peace Monument of 1877, was built on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C., adjacent to the U.S. Capitol. Funded by Navy veterans, the monument presents allegorical representations of History and America atop a marble pedestal. History holds a tablet upon which she records the deeds of those who preserved the union. She supports and consoles the weeping America with the words she has written, "They died that their country might live."

As the nation gained distance from the carnage of the Civil War and achieved economic and industrial growth in the later years of the 19th century, the funereal nature of earlier monuments gave way. Instead, monuments of the 1880s, like the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Portland, Maine, with its representation of America as a powerful Athena Nike figure, celebrate the preservation of the Union as the source of growing national strength.

Most of the memorials built in late 19th-century America, however, were more modest in both size and cost. During the last quarter of the 19th century, the bronze or stone figure of a soldier standing at "parade rest" that had first appeared at the war’s end became an American icon.

The figure type that sculptors like Martin Milmore developed for specific commissions could now be found everywhere, thanks to the growth of foundries, the granite industry and mass marketing techniques.

As the 19th century drew to a close, patrons with both the money and the desire to erect a monument of greater originality began to shudder at the prospect of receiving yet another example of the standard fare in soldier monuments. Dissatisfaction with the form did not result from its over use and poor aesthetic handling alone, but also from the notion that these sculpted figures did not properly reflect the true nature of the American soldier according to 1890s sensibilities. In its circular sent to prospective competitors for a soldiers’ monument in Covington, Ky., in 1894, the monument committee stipulated that it would not accept a figure at "parade rest, or one that looks as if he were ashamed that he was a soldier." Alice Ruggles Kitson told the Boston Globe in reference to a popular monument that she had designed that she did not want to depict another soldier who looked like he was about to shoot off his chin.

What monuments did meet with critical approval? Against a historical backdrop that included the nation’s first major military actions overseas -- the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and a controversial conflict from 1898 through 1902 against Filipinos who had been U.S. allies during the war with Spain -- patrons of monuments at the beginning of the 20th century demanded that new memorials to the Civil War’s soldiers present inspirational images that embodied nobility, strength, dynamism and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life in service to the nation. These also tended to be North-South neutral. With a focus on heroism and defense of the flag, these are monuments that tread very lightly on issues of the Civil War’s winners and losers. If the United States was to play a leading role on the world stage, there would be no room for sectional discord.

Period descriptions of the Grant Memorial place it squarely among the new breed of monuments. One observer wrote of the Artillery group, "I can guess at the thoughts of each man and feel the pulse and throb of each horse. The story of the campaign as well as the action they portray is all there."

During the years that immediately followed the Civil War, many Americans had embraced a progressive doctrine, suggesting that as a culture reached a higher level of civilization, the barbarity of warfare would become anachronistic. They reasoned that the increasingly complex social organizations of production and commerce would lead to the dominance of the rational modern man who would be able to solve disputes peacefully. By the end of the century, however, a competing view challenged this optimistic one. Many worried that modern culture would become overcivilized. They feared that the disappearance of a warrior mentality would render the nation helpless to defend itself should that need arise, and that increasing cosmopolitanism would lead to national impotence. No one worried about this more visibly than Theodore Roosevelt. In an 1897 essay he wrote: "There is a certain softness of fibre in civilized nations which … might mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to hold its own in those conflicts through which alone any great race can ultimately march to victory."

In response, monuments portraying the struggle and sacrifice of warfare appeared with frequency during the first decades of the 20th century and offered a revised interpretation of the Civil War. Seen neither as a lamentable chapter now concluded, nor as a harbinger of the national greatness that resulted from the Union preserved, these new monuments instead tried to reflect and instill the values of patriotic devotion and watchful preparedness that the modern nation state demanded of its citizens. No monument did this more forcefully, or in a more prominent location, than Washington, D.C.’s Ulysses S. Grant Memorial.