CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

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Taps

GRANT HAD REFRAINED from following the example of other Civil War generals who published their memoirs with a haste he found preening and self-aggrandizing. He disliked talking about himself and professed that he lacked the literary ability and industry to hazard such a venture. “Oh, I’m not going to write any book,” he told a reporter after leaving the White House. “There are books enough already.”^{1 The Century Magazine, which planned a series of articles entitled “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” sought Grant’s participation, but in January 1884 he vowed that “I have no idea of undertaking the task of writing any of the articles the Century requests.”2 With the collapse of Grant & Ward, the Century editors revived their offer to have him write on his battles, noting that the “country looks with so much regret and sympathy upon General Grant’s misfortune.”3 Though touched by their concern for his plight, Grant resisted the invitation to oblige them.}

With their finances in ruins, the Grants closed up the East Sixty-Sixth Street house and took up summer residence in Long Branch. The household staff had been dismissed and Julia, knocked from her high perch, was reduced to cooking in the twenty-eight-room cottage. On June 2, Grant swallowed a peach and suffered excruciating pain—the episode related at the start of this narrative. “He walked up and down the room and out to the piazza, and rinsed his throat again and again,” Julia recalled.⁴ Mystified, she thought an insect must have lodged in the peach. At first, Grant minimized a chronic sore throat that he had, but when the pain intensified in July, his next-door neighbor, George Childs, suggested he consult a Philadelphia doctor named Jacob Mendez Da Costa who was then visiting him. When he examined Grant, he discovered a growth on the roof of his mouth, prescribed pain medication, and advised Grant to consult his family physician, Dr. B. Fordyce Barker, as soon as possible. Barker was then on a European trip, which allowed Grant to stall for several months before seeing him. Was this another example of Grant’s lifelong stoicism or a childlike escape from frightening news?

Weak and lame, still on crutches, Grant knew he needed to repair his finances and agreed to a visit from a Century editor. The magazine dispatched thirty-one-year-old Robert Underwood Johnson, who found Grant garbed in a curious outfit for a warm summer day. Because of his sore throat, he had wrapped a cape around his shoulders and a white silk scarf around his neck—details that would assume new significance in retrospect. Grant talked about his perilous financial state, venting anger at Ferdinand Ward. “In his direct and simple fashion,” Johnson wrote, “he reviewed the debacle of his fortunes without restraint, showing deep feeling, even bitterness, as to his betrayal.”^{5 As Johnson listened and discovered Grant’s sensitive nature, he mentally likened him to “a wounded lion.”6 Once he had cleansed himself of anger, Grant got down to business. “He told me, frankly and simply,” wrote Johnson, “that he had arrived at Long Branch almost penniless.”7 In the end, Grant agreed to write four articles—on Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Appomattox—for $500 apiece. Later on he decided to dispense with Lee’s surrender in favor of the battle of Chattanooga.}

Largely secluded in the house, Grant set up a white wooden table in a room facing the seaside porch and it soon became cluttered with maps, books, and military papers. By the end of June, Grant had completed his first article on Shiloh, but it sorely disappointed the Century editors. Written in Grant’s pithy style, it was arid and compact and read like a bloodless report. Johnson hurried over to Long Branch for a pep talk with his new writer. A gifted editor, he drew Grant into personal reminiscences about Shiloh and made him see the difference between a dry recitation and one enlivened by personal impressions. This came as a revelation to Grant, who was an apt pupil and promised to start anew. As he did so, he felt a spurt of liberating energy. “Why, I am positively enjoying the work,” he told Johnson. “I am keeping at it every night and day, and Sundays.”^{8 Under Johnson’s tutelage, Grant discovered new dimensions to his writing, disclosing a huge literary gift that had lurked there all along.}

Nothing if not dogged, Grant marched on to Vicksburg, averaging more than four hours of writing per day, one visitor recalling Grant’s pen “racing over his pad.”^{9 Encouraged by Johnson to describe events more freely, he went from excessive concision to a more richly detailed style, completing a draft by the end of August. Grant’s stunning burst of prose led the Century editors to contemplate something more ambitious: publishing a memoir by Grant. To reel in his catch, Roswell Smith, the company president, traveled to Long Branch and chatted with Grant as they sat on wicker chairs on the verandah. At first, Grant reacted coyly, wondering whether “anyone would be interested in a book by me.” Smith replied, “General, do you not think the public would read with avidity Napoleon’s personal account of his battles?”10 He came away impressed by Grant’s firm grasp of publishing: “I found him thoroughly intelligent in relation to the subscription book business, and very much disgusted with the way it is usually managed.”11 At this point, Grant made no contractual commitment, preferring to wait until he had made further headway with the articles, which would form the basis of the book. Spending the rest of the month writing, he experienced the pride of authorship, pleasure of craftsmanship, and delight of reliving past triumphs. Greatly preoccupied with money, Grant revised his will on September 2, bequeathing his entire estate to Julia, about whose financial future he worried incessantly.}

By October, the Grants were back in New York, sharing their East Sixty-Sixth Street house with other refugees from the Grant & Ward debacle—Fred and Ida Grant and their children. Belatedly Grant consulted Dr. B. Fordyce Barker, who discovered a suspiciously swollen area on the back of his tongue and immediately referred him to Dr. John H. Douglas, a distinguished, white-bearded throat specialist, who had devised a wartime remedy for scurvy for Union soldiers. He examined Grant thoroughly, probing his mouth with his finger, and found a hard, swollen area at the base of the tongue. Using a mirror, he located three cancerous lesions on the roof of the mouth. At once, Grant suspected the worst. “Is it cancer?” he asked. Cancer was then routinely deemed a death sentence and the doctor shaded the brutal truth. “General, the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured.”^{12 Douglas was far more pessimistic than he let on. Using a cocaine and water mixture, he relieved some of the pain and swabbed out accumulated mucus and other debris, telling Grant to come back twice daily for treatment. Grant told neither Julia nor Fred what had happened, although he confided in Badeau. “When he returned he said the physician told him that his throat was affected by a complaint with a cancerous tendency. He seemed serious but not alarmed . . . Still there was disquietude and even alarm—the terrible word cancer was itself almost a knell.”13 When Grant confided in Julia, she fought the truth and refused to believe the ailment could be fatal.}

Gradually Grant was ground down into a mass of pain. He had a severe attack of neuralgia and, to relieve it, his dentist extracted several teeth without anesthesia, only worsening his misery. Extracting the teeth also made it easier for Dr. Douglas to clean out his throat. Every day, Grant collected his crutches and took a horse-drawn streetcar to see the doctor, unable to afford private cabs any longer. Passengers must have been startled to find themselves sitting next to America’s most renowned individual. Julia finally persuaded him to indulge in a carriage.

In early November, Douglas snipped a slice of tissue from Grant’s throat and sent it to Dr. George Frederick Shrady, an eminent pathologist, who had treated President Garfield after the shooting. Douglas was careful not to identify the patient. When Shrady diagnosed the problem as cancer of the throat and tongue, Douglas asked if he was certain. “Perfectly sure,” said Shrady crisply. “This patient has a lingual epithelioma—a cancer of the tongue.” Douglas now disclosed that Grant was the patient. “Then General Grant is doomed,” he replied.¹⁴ He predicted that Grant would endure agonizing pain and be dead within a year.

When Dr. Shrady met with Grant, he suspected a connection between his compulsive smoking and his cancer and advised him to restrict himself to one cigar a day. Pretty soon Grant lost his taste for tobacco altogether and, after a lifetime of oral cravings, smoked his last cigar on November 20, 1884. A journalist named C. E. Meade, a nephew of George Gordon Meade, claimed Grant puffed on his last cigar while visiting a horse farm in Goshen, New York. “Gentlemen,” Grant announced to his companions, “this is the last cigar I shall ever smoke. The doctors tell me that I will never live to finish the work on which my whole energy is centered these days . . . if I do not cease indulging in these fragrant weeds. It is hard to give up an old and cherished friend, that has been your comforter and solace through many weary nights and days. But my unfinished work must be completed, for the sake of those that are near and dear to me.”¹⁵

Julia never seemed to draw the proper connection between her husband’s smoking and his cancer. In her memoirs, she recounted a conversation with the emperor of Brazil at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. She had proudly pointed to bundles of American tobacco only to have the emperor object. “Humph, what is it good for?” Julia rushed to the defense of smoking in her high-spirited fashion. “Why, everything . . . It is a great pleasure to smoke. Smoking quiets the nerves. If one is wakeful it soothes one and promotes sleep. Smoking is a great assistant to digestion.”^{16 In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it.}

Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently. He rejoiced when Chester Arthur lost the Republican nomination to James G. Blaine, who he believed would trounce the Democratic candidate, Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, who had earned a reputation opposing political corruption. Grant had relented in his attitude toward Blaine: “To reject such a man in all the plenitude of his knowledge, ability and will for a man of Grover Cleveland’s limited experience would be beneath the good sense of the American people.”^{17 The American people begged to differ and the rotund Cleveland became the first elected Democrat in the White House since the Civil War. A new national consensus took a more conciliatory view of secession and blasted Reconstruction as an outright failure, giving Grant an additional motivation to publish his memoir and counter this growing revisionist view.}

The sudden intimation of his own mortality made Grant worry he would die and leave Julia impoverished. As a result, he told the delighted Century editors that he wished to publish his memoir with them. He recruited Fred as his researcher and editor and asked Adam Badeau to move into the house as his editor, promising to give him modest payments from the book royalties—the most Grant could afford in his straitened circumstances. He was so harassed by pecuniary worries that he gave up his pew in a Madison Avenue church, admitting sheepishly he did so “because of my inability to pay the rent.”^{18 Badeau had a host of unspoken reservations about assisting Grant. Having already published three volumes on Grant’s wartime campaigns, he feared they would be overshadowed by Grant’s work. He also disliked being sidetracked from a novel he was writing. A querulous man with an ever fragile ego, Badeau didn’t voice his concerns, letting them fester beneath the surface. Grant was very clear that Badeau would provide research and that he himself would write. “I am going to do it myself,” he told a visitor, flashing his old doughty independence. “If I do not do it myself it will not be mine.”19 Badeau agreed to Grant’s terms and took a bedroom at the East Sixty-Sixth Street house.}

By late November 1884, pain had become Grant’s constant companion. Avoiding solid foods, he had his devoted black valet, Harrison Terrell, bring him milk on a tray twice daily. Even liquids were pure torture for him to swallow. As he told George Childs, “Nothing gives me so much pain as swallowing water,” comparing it to drinking “molten lead.”^{20 His daily meals became harrowing ordeals and Adam Badeau left a graphic vignette of Grant’s struggles at the dinner table:}

I shall always recall his figure as he sat at the head of the table, his head bowed over his plate, his mouth set grimly, his features clinched in the endeavor to conceal the expression of pain, especially from Mrs. Grant, who sat at the other end. He no longer carved or helped the family, and at last was often obliged to leave before the meal was over, pacing the hall or the adjoining library in his agony. At this time he said to me that he had no desire to live if he was not to recover. He preferred death at once to lingering, hopeless disease.²¹

Whenever Grant lay down, he suffered from a ghastly sensation of being strangled. He therefore preferred to sit in an armchair, his legs resting on a chair before him with a blanket thrown over them, a silk handkerchief wound around his neck, and a woolen cap on his head. Unable to lie down normally, he was tormented by insomnia. On one occasion, Dr. Shrady was summoned to calm and reassure him. “Pretend you are a boy again,” he advised Grant. “Curl up your legs, lie over on your side and bend your neck while I tuck the covers around your shoulders.” As a docile Grant obeyed, he said, “Now go to sleep like a good boy,” and Grant soon fell fast asleep. But in his fitful sleep, he was often disturbed by nightmares. One night, as Fred stood listening, he heard his father bellow in his sleep, “The cannon did it.”²²

Always an active, enterprising man, Grant lapsed into unaccustomed apathy, sitting in his armchair, hands folded, staring blankly into space. “It was like a man gazing into his open grave,” wrote Badeau.²³ That December, when Sherman visited, he found a disconsolate Julia, who worried that her husband had withdrawn “into a silent moody state looking the picture of woe.”^{24 Attempting to rally her, Sherman conjured up the distant war days when a taciturn Grant sat silently at headquarters as he himself paced, swore, and talked a blue streak. Sherman noticed that Grant warmed up in his presence and that of any other faithful comrade from yesteryear. Seeing his stricken friend transported Sherman back to their wartime camaraderie and the purer love he had once felt for Grant.}

Grant’s catatonic state didn’t last. Soon he was devoting four or five hours daily to his memoirs, working in a second-floor room overlooking East Sixty-Sixth Street, surrounded by huge volumes that housed his military orders and maps. As he worked, Julia constantly replenished bouquets of fresh flowers. In the evening he sometimes read aloud to her from the manuscript. For a time, his pain eased, permitting more work as he wrote on loose sheets of lined paper in a clear, flowing hand. Lest she descend into depression, Julia struggled to keep her emotions in check and feigned a brisk, businesslike manner. “Her calmness and self-control almost seemed coldness,” said Badeau, “only we knew that this was impossible.”²⁵

The Century editors offered Grant a standard 10 percent royalty for his memoir with projected sales of twenty-five thousand copies. That summer the Century editor Richard Watson Gilder told Robert Johnson that Grant “ought not to be permitted to get too high an idea of immediate sales and profits. We have never had such a card before as Grant . . . and we mustn’t let that slip!”²⁶

They didn’t reckon on the intervention of another prospective publisher who was dropping by to see Grant. Grant had always been fascinated by Mark Twain, a frequent lunchtime guest at Grant & Ward. Three years earlier Twain had attempted to persuade him to compose his memoirs only to have Grant deprecate his own writing ability. In February 1884, Twain set up his nephew Charles Webster in a new publishing outfit known as Charles L. Webster and Company whose sole mission, at first, was to publish Huckleberry Finn and other Twain works. With this venture Twain was bogged down in debt from the outset. “I am like everybody else—everything tied up in properties that cannot be sold except at fearful loss,” he told William Dean Howells that March. “It has been the roughest twelve-month I can remember for losses, ill luck, and botched business.”^{27 Twain had a money-crazed side to his nature in which he resembled many of the arrivistes he satirized, and he expected Grant’s memoirs to be a bonanza that would salvage his endangered publishing firm.}

In November 1884, after giving a speech, Twain enjoyed a late supper at the studio of Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century Magazine, and learned that Grant was preparing four articles for the magazine. Gilder boasted of having rescued Grant from poverty with a $500 check for his initial piece. Twain was aghast: he thought the amount scandalously small—the literary equivalent of buying “a dollar bill of a blind man and [paying] him ten cents for it.”^{28 When Gilder let slip the momentous news that Grant had agreed to write his memoirs, Twain, agog, made a silent resolution. “I wanted the General’s book,” he said, “and I wanted it very much.”29 He was instantly riveted by prospective riches from the project, although he didn’t yet know that Grant had cancer.}

The next morning, Twain hurried over to East Sixty-Sixth Street where Grant confirmed Gilder’s terms and added that he was about to sign a contract. When Fred read the proposed terms aloud, with the 10 percent royalty, Twain silently grunted in disbelief. He pitied Grant as a simple, tenderhearted babe in the woods. “I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh,” he explained.³⁰ As he later wrote, the Century had the barefaced cheek to offer Grant the same royalty it would have given “to any unknown Comanche Indian whose book they had reason to believe might sell 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 copies.”^{31 Twain knew Grant’s memoirs would sell hundreds of thousands of copies and assured him the Century terms were “simply absurd and should not be considered for an instant.”32 Insisting that Grant was selling himself much too cheaply, he said he should up the stakes and demand a 20 percent royalty or 70 percent of net profits.}

Twain knew he was muscling in on the Century’s cozy deal with Grant and could be accused of sharp practice as well. So he concocted a story about walking home in the rain from a lecture when he fleetingly overheard two shadowy figures mention Grant’s decision to publish his memoirs. If Twain had no scruples about stealing Grant from the Century, Grant was more honorable. When he told Twain that demanding such exorbitant royalties would place him in the position of a robber, the famous author was ready with a witticism: “I said that if he regarded that as a crime it was because his education had been neglected. I said it was not a crime, and was always rewarded in heaven with two halos.”^{33 When Grant asked what publisher would possibly accede to such conditions, Twain said any reputable publisher in America. Still Grant balked at deserting the Century. “To his military mind and training it seemed disloyalty,” recalled Twain.34 The next day, the author returned with a novel proposition: “Sell me the Memoirs, General.”35 He proposed a 20 percent royalty or 70 percent of net profits and offered to write a $50,000 check on the spot.}

It took Grant time to fathom the wisdom and morality of Twain’s superior offer. Sweetening the terms, Twain offered to give Grant living expenses as he composed the book and even offered Jesse a place on the publishing house staff—no trifling incentive for Grant as he fretted about his family. As he mulled over Twain’s offer, Grant must have recalled how many times he had been fleeced in his life. For once he would not allow himself to be shortchanged. “On reexamining the Contract prepared by the Century people,” he told George Childs, “I see that it is all in favor of the publisher, with nothing left for the Author.”^{36 Grant leaned toward the 70 percent profit plan in which he would make money only if Twain did too, but the latter tried to convince him that the 20 percent royalty was a better deal for him. In the end, the honorable Grant insisted on the 70 percent profit arrangement.}

By January, Grant’s condition had deteriorated and he required daily visits from Drs. Douglas and Shrady. When he meditated a therapeutic trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, the doctors told him he was too weak to make the journey. Formerly robust and brawny, Grant began to lose flesh rapidly, shedding thirty pounds. At one point, Julia was told the “dreadful truth” by the doctors, but could not accept it: “I could not believe that God . . . would take this great, wise, good man from us, to whom he was so necessary and so beloved.”^{37 Her whole life had revolved around her husband and she tried to face the stark truth as bravely as she could. “Genl Grant is very, very ill,” she told a friend on February 28. “I cannot write how ill—my tears blind me.”38}

With Julia having sold her property in Washington, the Grants lived in passable comfort again. Both Twain and Charles Webster visited constantly, preaching the virtues of their publishing house. They brought a leather-bound edition of Huckleberry Finn, inscribed to Fred’s daughter, Julia, who remembered Twain “with his shaggy mane of long white hair, waving or carelessly tossed about his low brow, and his protruding eyebrows, which almost hid the deep-set eyes shining beneath them.” She thought him a “crazy man, and I would draw close to one or another of the grown-ups when he was around.”^{39 Soon Fred Grant was paging through Huckleberry Finn by candlelight.}

Behind closed doors, Twain and Webster went wild with excitement at the prospect of landing Grant’s memoirs. “There’s big money for us both in that book,” Webster told Twain, “and on the terms indicated in my note to the General we can make it pay big.”^{40 Returning from a lecture tour in late February, Twain was taken aback by how gray and haggard Grant had grown. “I mean you shall have the book—I have about made up my mind to that,” Grant reassured him, but he wanted to write first to Roswell Smith of the Century Company “and tell him I have so decided. I think this is due him.”41 Once again, Grant instinctively did the decent thing. As Twain was leaving, Fred pulled him aside and divulged that doctors thought his father might have only a few weeks to live—news that didn’t deter Twain from the deal.}

On February 27, 1885, Grant signed a contract with Charles L. Webster and Company and Twain rushed a much-needed thousand-dollar check into his hands. “It was a shameful thing,” recalled Twain, “that a man who had saved his country and its government from destruction should still be in a position where so small a sum—$1000—could be looked upon as a godsend.”^{42 The news, announced a few days later, created a hubbub in the press. The memoirs would be sold by subscription in two-volume boxed sets, lessening reliance on reviews, and Twain mapped out a sales campaign worthy of Grant’s military efficiency. He divided the country into sixteen sections with as many general agents, who would oversee an army of ten thousand door-to-door canvassers. They would follow a sales manual that sounded like Twain shouting through a megaphone. They were told to eschew “the Bull Run voice” and “keep pouring hot shot” into the hapless customer until he signed on the dotted line. Not missing a trick, Twain would have retired veterans knocking on doors, asking people to help out their old general. Twain hailed this campaign as “the vastest book enterprise the world has ever seen.”43}

On March 1, 1885, The New York Times ran a headline that robbed Ulysses and Julia Grant of any remaining hope: “Grant Is Dying.” The subhead continued: “Dying Slowly from Cancer; Gravely Ill; Sinking into the Grave; Gen. Grant’s Friends Give up Hope.”^{44 The article, not mincing words, quoted Grant’s doctors as saying that he had only a few months to live “and that his death may occur in a short time.”45 It pointed out that Grant had been advised by Dr. Da Costa to see his physician but had dangerously deferred the visit. By the next day, the national press corps had camped outside the East Sixty-Sixth Street residence. The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston. A black man from Washington, George M. Arnold, told Fred Grant “to let Gen Grant know how the Colored people of this country feel towards him, how they love honir [sic] and pray for him.”46}

Grant was stunned by the grim prognosis of the newspapers. “That his days were numbered was an intimation for which he was not prepared,” wrote Badeau.⁴⁷ At times, he hobbled over to the window and gazed at the correspondents keeping a constant vigil outside his windows, offering them a wan smile. The power of the new mass media made Grant’s illness a national spectacle, with his doctors offering twice-daily updates on his condition. Grant had always been at his best when dealing with the hard realities of life and he accepted his plight with majestic fortitude.

Grant’s illness gave fresh impetus to efforts to relieve his financial distress. He still hoped to be placed on the army retired list with the rank and full pay of general, which would endow him with $13,500 per annum. When President Arthur proposed a special pension for him, he hotly resisted, believing this would tag him as an object of charity. William Tecumseh Sherman opposed Grant’s restoration to the army retired list, preferring an outright pension, telling Senator John Logan that “to give the president the right to place General Grant on duty as a full General on our small Peace Establishment, will lead to intrigues damaging to the Army, and making the situation of both Genl Sheridan & myself most uncomfortable.”^{48 Sherman’s view soon found its way into the press, and when Logan transmitted it to Grant, he grew indignant. “He is not looking after the interests of the Army,” Grant snapped, “nor do I believe he represents their feeling in regard to the bill you champion.”49 It was yet another proof of the private war Sherman had waged against Grant, usually without the latter’s knowledge. Perhaps embarrassed by the disclosure, Sherman began to lobby to restore Grant to the army list.}

On February 16, the anniversary of Fort Donelson’s fall, the retirement bill was voted down, leaving Grant sorely disappointed. Then the New York Times story on his illness altered the political atmosphere in Washington, resuscitating the bill’s prospects. Time, however, was short: the new Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, would be sworn in at noon on March 4. When Congress adjourned on the night of March 3 without passing the bill, Grant despaired. “You know during the last day of a session everything is in turmoil,” he reflected. “Such a thing cannot possibly be passed.”^{50 On the morning of March 4, in an extraordinary sequence of events, the House approved the bill right before the noon deadline. Senators had already adjourned to the Capitol for the inauguration. They were abruptly rounded up and herded back into the Senate chamber, the hands of the clock were turned back twenty minutes, and, to tempestuous applause, they approved Grant’s bill. Chester Arthur hurried to the Capitol to sign it. As his last presidential act, he nominated Grant, and President Cleveland renewed his commission as general of the army. Chester Arthur instructed the president pro tempore of the Senate to send Grant a congratulatory telegram.}

Mark Twain was with Grant when it arrived and witnessed the tremendous tonic it administered to his spirits, likening it to “raising the dead.”^{51 All those present knew it was Grant’s fervent wish to die a full general and they stood there brimming with emotion. Only Grant could contain his emotions. “He read the telegram, but not a shade or suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance,” Twain said. “The volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression of it and make no sign.”52 Typically laconic, Grant said, “I am grateful the thing has passed.” Julia was ebullient: “Hurrah, they have brought us back our old commander.”53 That same day, the army’s adjutant general officially notified Grant of his reappointment and, in his own hand, Grant slowly scrawled his reply. “I accept the position of General of the Army on the retired list.”54}

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EVEN AS HIS ENERGY EBBED, and despite gruesome pain, Grant applied himself to his manuscript with steady dedication, his memory unfailingly retentive. Sometimes he napped and returned to writing when he awoke and often lengthened his working day by writing after dinner. Observing his ardor, Edwards Pierrepont speculated that Grant “wanted to take advantage of every moment to hasten the work that will probably be the last labor of his life.”^{55 Now a regular visitor at Grant’s house, Twain prevailed upon him to hire the stenographer Noble E. Dawson, who set to work and admired how Grant “made very few changes and never hemmed and hawed.” As he dealt with sharp mouth pain, Grant tried to master a new but laborious way of speaking without moving his tongue. The day Dawson showed Twain the manuscript of the first volume, the writer was “astonished . . . and said there was not one literary man in one hundred who furnished as clear a copy as Grant.”56 As a result, Twain’s editing was mostly restricted to trivial matters of grammar and punctuation.}

Grant took time out to settle one score. Elihu Root, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was prosecuting Grant & Ward partner James D. Fish for violating national banking laws and Grant was eager to give a deposition. When lawyers arrived at East Sixty-Sixth Street on March 26, they found Grant in an armchair, ensconced before a hickory wood fire, wearing a skullcap and dressing gown. He testified for three-quarters of an hour, sometimes flinching with pain. If harsh in denouncing Fish and Ward, Grant was toughest on himself, admitting he had never perused the firm’s monthly statements. Asked whether he had ever mistrusted Ferdinand Ward, he replied, “I had no mistrust of Mr. Ward the night before the failure, not the slightest . . . It took me a day or two to believe it was possible that Ward had committed the act he had.”⁵⁷

At the close of the deposition, the lawyers lingered to chat with Grant. “You’re certainly looking remarkably well,” one said, but Grant disagreed, ruefully shaking his head. “I am conscious of the fact that I am a very sick man.”^{58 His testimony, read aloud in court, made a huge impression. Fish was sentenced to ten years in Auburn Prison, later commuted to four years; Ferdinand Ward would serve six years in Sing Sing. By forcing Grant to relive the Grant & Ward nightmare, the deposition exacted a terrible bodily toll and within hours he experienced a wrenching cough and had to be doused with cocaine and morphine.}

On March 29, Grant awoke gasping from a restless sleep, couldn’t clear his throat secretions, and succumbed to violent coughs. It took two hours before the doctors arrived and Grant’s family thought he might expire in the interim. Doctors plied him with injections of brandy and ammonia—national temperance groups objected to the brandy—and dislodged objects wedged in his throat, but he underwent another terrifying episode two hours later, crying out in a strangled voice, “I can’t stand it! I am going to die!”^{59 Doctors applied chloroform to quiet him and mitigate the pain. Dr. Fordyce Barker blamed the deposition for weakening Grant, whose deeply lined face showed complete exhaustion. Dr. Shrady gloomily informed the press, “It is doubtful if the General’s health could stand another choking attack.”60 By April 4, Grant had bounced back unexpectedly and Dr. Douglas teased him, “General, we propose to keep to this line if it takes all summer,” which elicited a smile from Grant.61}

Around this time he performed a ceremony that he had contemplated for some time. He asked Fred to compose a letter requesting a future president of the United States to appoint his grandson Ulysses (Fred’s son) as a West Point cadet. Grant summoned family members and doctors as witnesses before he affixed his signature to the document. It was such a solemn gesture for him that as he folded the paper, a hush gripped the room. In 1898 President William McKinley would honor the request by appointing Ulysses S. Grant III, later a major general, to the academy.

Easter Day that year dawned bright and clear, and large crowds promenaded along Fifth Avenue, many pausing at the corner of East Sixty-Sixth Street to gaze concernedly at Grant’s town house. From the bay window, Dr. Shrady observed the swelling crowd mingling on the sidewalk below. The scene abounded with reporters, but ordinary citizens also gathered there, often weeping. Grant took his cane, shuffled to the window, and, screened by curtains, pondered the multitude. “I am very grateful to them,” he told the doctor, who suggested, “Why not tell them so, General?”^{62 Shrady pointed out that newspaper readers might appreciate a direct message from him. “Very well,” said Grant. As Shrady grabbed a yellow paper, Grant dictated: “General Grant wishes it stated that he is very much touched by, and very grateful for, the sympathy and interest manifested for him by his friends and by those”—here he momentarily wavered—“who have not been regarded as such.”63 Adam Badeau cheered, “Splendid! Splendid! Stop right there, General Grant! I would not say another word.” After minor edits, the statement went out to newspapers across America.}

As cancerous sores spread in Grant’s mouth, Dr. Shrady studied his courteous, gentlemanly patient, the “far-off look” in his eyes and his meditative mood.⁶⁴ “He had the gentlest disposition, like that of an unspoiled young girl.”^{65 Shrady said Grant knew his disease was terminal and that he could only look forward to more grisly pain. Nonetheless, he discussed his symptoms clinically, even taking his own pulse, a scientific detachment that had served him well in battle. “Brave though he had been on the battlefield, his courage in facing death from an incurable disease was not only a revelation but an inspiration,” Shrady wrote.66}

A couple of days after Easter, Grant was “seized with a severe fit of coughing . . . followed by a hemorrhage of arterial blood,” reported one newspaper, which didn’t think he would survive the night.⁶⁷ Grant awoke to a telegram from Queen Victoria, inquiring anxiously after his health, followed two weeks later by one from Prime Minister William Gladstone. As Grant approached the twentieth anniversary of Appomattox, he suffered no illusions. “My chances, I think, of pulling through this are one in a hundred.”^{68 Privately, Fred Dent sounded even more dubious, writing that his brother-in-law was “going to die soon unless a miracle saves him.”69}

Neither morbid nor mournful, Grant faced his mortality in clear-eyed fashion and his sensible nature never deserted him. A lifelong Methodist, he had always viewed religious excess with a certain irony, having once told a clutch of ministers that America boasted three parties: Democrats, Republicans, and Methodists. The Reverend John P. Newman now became a familiar face at East Sixty-Sixth Street. When he led the family in evening prayers, Grant found the experience a bit trying. Fred said his father was a good Christian but “not a praying man,” yet Grant allowed Newman to pray for him to soothe Julia. Grant had never been baptized. On the night of April 1, when he had a terrible ordeal that required morphine, Julia asked Dr. Newman to baptize him. When Grant awoke, Newman informed him that he was about to baptize him—“Thank you, Doctor,” the patient replied, “I intended to take that step myself”—and applied water to Grant’s brow from a silver bowl. Jesse Grant insisted his father was unconscious when baptized and grew “annoyed and indignant” when he found out what had happened, but said nothing for fear of upsetting Julia.⁷⁰

Dr. Newman became a controversial figure as he issued grandiose pronouncements on the state of Grant’s soul, crediting his recovery from the April 1 crisis to the power of prayer. A foe of cant, Mark Twain was aghast at Newman’s statements and wrote him off as a mountebank: “It is fair to presume that most of Newman’s daily reports originated in his own imagination.”^{71 Buck’s father-in-law, former senator Chaffee, also condemned Newman’s shameless efforts to distort Grant’s religiosity: “General Grant does not believe that Doctor Newman’s prayers will save him. He allows the doctor to pray simply because he does not want to hurt his feelings.”72 When Newman told Grant that God wanted to employ him for “a great spiritual mission,” Grant deflated his rhetoric by inquiring, “Can he cure cancer?”73}

Twain admired the even-tempered humility of the withered general. As world luminaries inundated him with telegrams, Twain was struck by his “perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention.”^{74 He pondered Grant’s kindness and “aggravatingly trustful nature” and couldn’t fathom how the man who had negotiated tough terms at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg was such a ready mark for Ferdinand Ward.75 Grant was still ashamed of having been fooled by Ward’s blatant deception, but refused to submit to vengeance. Twain, by contrast, said he himself was “inwardly boiling all the time. I was scalping Ward, flaying him alive, breaking him on the wheel, pounding him to jelly, and cursing him with all the profanity known to the one language I am acquainted with.”76}

Grant was fated to have one final disappointment in a trusted figure. Ever since joining Grant’s staff in 1864, Adam Badeau had relied on Grant for advancement at every turn. Thanks to Grant he had retired from the army as a brevet brigadier general, worked in the White House, and served as U.S. consul in London. The bearded, bespectacled Badeau fancied himself a literary man, becoming Grant’s authorized wordsmith, and lectured on his military campaigns. His career was shadowed by drinking allegations. When he shared a Washington boardinghouse with Henry Adams, the latter said he “resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement.”^{77 Grant retained him as London consul even after Hamilton Fish reported that Badeau had engaged in extended drinking bouts, some lasting for days. One Grant intimate remembered Badeau “in the vicinity of the White House, so drunk, that he walked in a circle two or three time[s] round before he straightened out.”78 It was yet another case of Grant loving not wisely but too well.}

Grant had spelled out clearly the terms upon which Badeau would assist him with his memoirs. Knowing his memoirs would compete with Badeau’s history, he promised to pay him $5,000 from the first $20,000 in royalties and $5,000 from the next $10,000. Badeau seemed content with the arrangement. But, like many sycophants, Badeau nursed secret resentments of the man upon whom he had relied, hidden grievances that boiled over in April as work on the memoirs dragged on longer than expected and Grant’s illness made working conditions arduous. Grant would give pages to Badeau, who corrected spelling and grammar or assisted with the narrative flow—standard copyediting tasks. Although Badeau helped to polish the book and knit together random passages, the essential content and style came from Grant and were fully consistent with his earlier writings. Badeau, however, feared history would honor the wrong man, the inferior writer and historian U. S. Grant, and his version of events found its way into print on April 29 when the New York World ran a gossipy item denying that Grant could possibly author his own reminiscences. “The work upon his new book, about which so much has been said, is the work of Gen. Adam Badeau,” it declared.⁷⁹ Mark Twain erupted in fury, branding the World “that daily issue of unmedicated closet paper.” Instead of settling for an apology or a retraction, he implored Grant to bring a lawsuit whose punitive damages would “cripple—yes, disable—that paper financially.”^{80 When no other papers dignified the charge, Twain relented and advised against legal action.}

On May 2, Badeau composed an insulting letter to Grant that protested the arrangement under which he worked. He didn’t bother to mask his rage or show respect for his longtime patron. Because Grant now had to dictate his memoir, Badeau claimed his job would be to “connect the disjointed fragments into a connected narrative. This work is the merest literary drudgery—such as I would never consent to do for any one but you . . . I desire the fame of my own book, not of yours. Yours is not, and will not be, the work of a literary man, but the simple story of a man of affairs and of a great general; proper for you, but not such as would add to my credit at all.”^{81 Incensed that Grant’s book would “supplant and stamp out mine,” he demanded payment of $1,000 monthly in advance and, more shockingly, 10 percent of all profits from Grant’s book.82 A pallid Badeau melodramatically handed Grant the letter that morning, after which Fred found his father pacing moodily. Grant had always taken pride in his writing style and was deeply wounded by Badeau’s letter. Removing it from a drawer, he gave it to Fred. “Read this & tell me what you think of it,” he said.83 According to Julia, the Badeau letter represented “the most cruel blow” her husband had ever received.84}

During the next few days, a weakened Grant wrote an impassioned reply that covered eleven foolscap pages and is unique in his annals. Seldom, if ever, did he deliver such blunt, unsparing criticism. He started out by saying that he and Badeau must now part, since he could find many people to perform the task of editing who would find it neither drudgery nor degrading. Then came a devastating critique of Badeau that showed Grant’s powers of psychological penetration: “You are petulant, your anger is easily aroused and you are overbearing even to me at times, and always with those for whom you have done or are doing, literary work.”^{85 He reviewed Badeau’s history of quarrels with publishers and politicians and how he grew enraged if his advice went unheeded. Grant blamed the poor sales of Badeau’s Military History on his interminable delays and long-winded style. Then turning to Badeau’s charge that he needed help writing his book, Grant offered a stirring defense of his own style:}

I have only to say that for the last twenty-four years I have been very much employed in writing. As a soldier I wrote my own orders, directions and reports. They were not edited nor assistance rendered. As President I wrote every official document, I believe, bearing my name . . . All these have been published and widely circulated. The public has become accustomed to them and [know] my style of writing. They know that it is not even an attempt to imitate either a literary [or classical style] and that it is just what it is pure and simple and nothing else.⁸⁶

Badeau’s reply was bitterly ungracious: “You look upon my assistance as that of an ordinary clerk or literary hack; I thought I was aiding you as no one else could in doing a great work.”^{87 He promised to remove his belongings from East Sixty-Sixth Street and secure new lodgings. The feud left Badeau in an awkward position: he had been excommunicated by the dying Grant even as he traded on his intimacy with him. In a letter published years later, Badeau pretended that Grant hadn’t been in his right mind when he wrote the angry dismissal: “This letter . . . could never have received Gen. Grant’s sanction had he been well in body and mind; drugged, diseased, and under the influence of his son, he put his name to a paper unworthy of his fame, full of petty spite and vulgar malice, such as he never displayed, and worse yet, of positive and palpable falsehood.”88}

Grant was not through cutting Badeau down to proper size. Two months later, he sent him a taunting letter, saying Fred had been forced to redo Badeau’s work on the memoirs, having found too many errors. “To be frank with you you are helpless, and filled with a false pride . . . You, a literary man, cannot sharpen a lead pencil, open a box or pack up your books.” He let Badeau know he had long overlooked his drinking history. “On one occasion you were sent from London to Madrid with very important dispatches, got overcome with liquor and switched off by the wayside and did not turn up in Madrid for some days after you should have been there . . . your nature is not of that unselfish kind I had supposed.”⁸⁹

Luckily, Grant was surrounded by loving family members who didn’t disappoint him. Nellie came from England and moved into the house. Grant grew even more doting with his children. He had always inspired loyalty in people who worked for him, especially his butler and valet—and more recently nurse—Harrison Terrell, who was born into slavery and had been with him for four years. While some family members seemed to dislike Terrell, Grant always defended him and refused to allow him to be mistreated. Twain remembered Grant’s referring to the discrimination visited upon Terrell as a black man by saying, “We are responsible for these things in his face—it is not fair to visit our fault upon them—let him alone.”⁹⁰

In his final months, Grant showed exceptional kindness to Terrell, furnishing him with a glowing recommendation letter for use after his death so he could find employment as a War Department messenger. Terrell’s son Robert had just graduated cum laude from Harvard. While he was there, Grant had provided him with a beautiful letter to obtain summer work in the Boston Custom House: “My special interest in him is from the fact that his father—a most estimable man—is my butler, beside I should feel an interest in any young man, white or colored, who had the courage and ability to graduate himself at Harvard without other pecuniary aid than what he could earn.”^{91 Robert Terrell was to befriend Booker T. Washington and become the first black municipal judge in Washington.}

Harrison Terrell had unusual opportunities to observe Grant’s drinking habits. Like earlier commentators, he acknowledged that even “a couple of small swallows” caused Grant to slur his speech and noted that he invariably abstained from alcohol at stressful moments.⁹² “It is not true that Gen. Grant was a whiskey guzzler,” he insisted. “Like many another man, he liked an occasional nip very well, but, after all, he was no more than a moderate drinker.”^{93 Andrew Carnegie, who had dined frequently with Grant in New York, recalled how he would turn his wineglass upside down at dinners: “That indomitable will of his enabled him to remain steadfast to his resolve, a rare case as far as my experience goes.”94 All available evidence suggests Grant had abstained from alcohol and largely vanquished the problem through sheer willpower and perseverance—his stock in trade—and the protective vigilance of his loving wife. It was one of the supreme triumphs of a life loaded with major accomplishments.}

Mark Twain had struggled with similar cravings for alcohol and tobacco. When they discussed the subject, Grant mentioned that although doctors had urged him to sip whiskey or champagne, he could no longer abide the taste of liquor. Twain pondered this statement long and hard. “Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense?” he wondered. “Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others & likewise himself that he hadn’t ever even had any taste for it.”^{95 Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors’ behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. “I could understand that feeling,” Twain later proclaimed. “He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk.”96 Although Twain hated puritanical killjoys who robbed life of its small pleasurable vices, he respected abstinence based on an absence of desire.}

Nothing riled Twain more than assertions that he had secretly ghostwritten Grant’s memoirs—a canard that has echoed down the years. Twain was the first to admit that Grant’s lean, ironic prose was unique and paid homage to Grant’s “flawless” style.⁹⁷ He could no more imitate Grant than vice versa. A close inspection of Grant’s manuscript in the Library of Congress shows the writing in his own hand, starting with the clear, flowing penmanship of the early months down to the cramped, slanted fragments of the later period when pain and narcotics fogged his mind. Some final sections appear to be in the handwriting of Noble E. Dawson or Fred Grant, but never of Twain.

With Badeau gone, Grant experienced a remarkable burst of productivity and wrote with keen relish. As in wartime, he was at his best when death lurked around the corner. Alone in his library, he subordinated everything to writing, and newspapers meticulously chronicled his literary progress. “So absorbed did he become in the business at hand,” one paper reported, “that he voluntarily gave up his noonday drive and afternoon walk.”^{98 Amid this astonishing output, Twain was nonplussed to learn from Fred that his father needed an encouraging editorial word: “I was as much surprised as Columbus’s cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.”99 Grant was overjoyed when Twain told him his memoirs would stand alongside Caesar’s Commentaries for purity, simplicity, and fairness and qualify as “the best purely narrative literature in the language.”100 On May 23, Grant realized he had to pen a dedication for his narrative. “These volumes are dedicated to the American soldier and sailor,” he wrote simply.101 When Fred questioned whether the dedication alluded only to those who had fought for the North, he replied that it was for “those we fought against as well as those we fought with. It may serve a purpose in restoring harmony.”102}

On April 27, when Grant celebrated his sixty-third birthday, Andrew Carnegie rushed over sixty-three roses and Julia illuminated the dinner table with sixty-three candles. Grant calmly faced the prospect of his own death and refused to skirt the issue. In mid-May, he dictated a message for a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that had a touching, patriarchal tone: “Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again, nor hear my voice, but they are engraved on my heart, and I love them as my children.”^{103 On Memorial Day, four hundred veterans trudged past his window as he stared down at them. Afterward, he slumped in his armchair and yielded to dreamy reflections as their martial music faded away down the block.}

Despite Grant’s grave situation, Twain was galvanized by the projected sales for his book and hovered over every aspect of publication. By late May, he boasted that he and Charley Webster had collected 100,000 orders for the two-volume boxed sets. To cater to this robust demand, they had lined up twenty presses and seven binderies to crank out the books. Twain now predicted staggering sales: 300,000 sets, or 600,000 individual volumes.

In mid-May, when Grant’s physicians wondered how to spare him the fierce heat of a Manhattan summer, his friend Joseph W. Drexel made an offer he could not resist. Saratoga Springs, a stylish resort in upstate New York known for fine summer weather, mineral waters, and a Thoroughbred racetrack, had become a favorite haunt of Wall Street financiers. Drexel was a minor partner in the Hotel Balmoral, recently opened at the peak of Mount McGregor, 1,100 feet above sea level; just down the road he had built a charming, roomy cottage that he placed at Grant’s disposal. His associate W. J. Arkell later confessed he had hoped that if Grant “should die there, it might make the place a national shrine—and incidentally a success.”^{104 The doctors loved the idea of Grant breathing in pine-scented mountain air, free from summer heat, mosquitoes, and noxious city vapors. Excited by escaping from East Sixty-Sixth Street, Grant told a reporter that he walked around his room after breakfast “getting himself in condition for long tramps through the woods after he got in the country.”105 After Grant suffered a bad day and postponing the trip was reluctantly broached to him, he exclaimed, “Now or never!”106}

Early on the morning of June 16, 1885, a shrunken man with white hair and a gray-flecked beard—Grant had now dropped sixty pounds—shuffled from 3 East Sixty-Sixth Street and stepped into bright sunlight. Despite a sweltering day, he stood bundled in a black coat and black beaver hat, a white scarf concealing a neck tumor “as big as a man’s two fists put together,” wrote a journalist.¹⁰⁷ Grant was accompanied by Julia, Fred and Ida, Nellie, and five grandchildren, plus Dawson, Terrell, and Dr. Douglas. A carriage bore them to Grand Central Depot, where Grant disembarked and moved slowly toward the train, leaning on his cane, his slippers scraping the pavement. He traveled aboard a private car owned by William H. Vanderbilt, which was emptied to make room for two bulky leather armchairs that enabled Grant to sit on one and rest his legs on the other. As the train chugged upstate, small crowds gathered at stations and crossings and waved as he sped by. Once at Mount McGregor, he boarded a narrow-gauge railroad that lifted him to the summit. With customary grit, he tried to totter up the last stretch of dirt path alone, aided by his cane, under a welcoming arch that proclaimed, “Our Hero.”^{108 When his strength failed, two husky police officers deposited him in a wicker chair and carried him the remaining distance to the cottage.}

The house was painted a rich gold color, trimmed in brown and faced with dark green shutters. Joseph Drexel had furnished it expressly for Grant’s stay, knowing he would be largely restricted to the first floor. Grant’s two black leather armchairs faced each other in a corner bedroom, right off the porch, so he could sleep sitting up and write with a board across the armrests. For pain relief, he took a cocaine-and-water solution and received periodic injections of brandy and morphine to pump up his heart rate. Doctors had to keep scouring dead matter and debris from his mouth. Grant immediately scratched away at his manuscript. “I have worked faster than if I had been well,” he told Twain. “I have used my three boys and a stenographer.”^{109 Even when Julia coaxed him onto the verandah for rest, he yearned to get back to work. The work sustained him, giving him a reason to soldier on. “It is very pleasant to be here,” he told her, “but I must go to my writing or I fear my book will not be finished.”110 When he sat on the porch, often in a silk top hat, hundreds of onlookers sauntered by to steal glimpses of him from the pathway leading up to the hotel. Frail, emaciated, starving to death from his inability to eat, he wore warm clothing in the early summer heat. His wit never abandoned him. Sneaking peeks at news headlines, he told Dr. Shrady that The New York Times has been “killing me off for a year. If it does not change, it will get it right in time.”111}

Racing against the Grim Reaper, Grant put in several hours of work per day, often pausing, short of breath, after an hour. Unable to talk any longer, he kept a pad and pencil at his side, scribbling tiny notes to family and doctors. “About an hour ago,” he wrote to Dr. Douglas, “I coughed up a piece of stringy matter about the size of a small lizard.”^{112 In another message he wrote, “I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”113 One day, when he seemed to drift off into the twilight of death, he suddenly awoke. “I was passing away peacefully and soon all would have been over,” he wrote. “It was like falling asleep.” There was something poignant about Grant as he mutely raised his eyes, searching the faces of interlocutors. As Buck said, “His eyes were always expressive and it hurt me to look at him and see his suffering . . . Watching him suffer was the hardest thing I have ever been through.”114}

Analyzing his own symptoms with clinical detachment, he told Dr. Douglas that he would die from a hemorrhage, strangulation, or exhaustion. All physicians could do was “to make my burden of pain as light as possible.”^{115 He went through terrifying sensations of being strangled by thick ropes of phlegm. “I have no desire to live,” he scribbled to Reverend Newman. “But I do not want you to let my family know this.”116 Despite the relief morphine brought, Grant had a horror of addiction and swallowed only three drops per day. Even though he sipped old port and drank some wine to relieve symptoms, they didn’t help, making him forswear alcohol one last time. “I do not think alcoholic drinks agree with me,” he wrote. “They seem to heat me up and have no other effect.”117}

On June 29, Grant composed a private letter to Julia that discussed his burial place for the first time. He was in a quandary since they were “comparative strangers” in New York City. He preferred West Point as his resting place, except that Julia would be excluded there. “I therefore leave you free to select what you think the most appropriate place for depositing my earthly remains.”^{118 He bid her “a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.”119}

Grant had never been especially reflective about the improbable course of his life. Now the whole pattern stood wondrously revealed to him, as he described to Dr. Douglas:

It seems that one man’s destiny in this world is quite as much a mystery as it is likely to be in the next. I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for; yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officers for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for a political life; yet I was twice president of the United States. If anyone had suggested the idea of my becoming an author, as they frequently did I was not sure whether they were making sport of me or not. I have now written a book which is in the hands of the manufacturers.¹²⁰

Perhaps reflecting on his grievous disappointments with people, he wrote philosophically, “I am glad to say that while there is much unblushing wickedness in this world, yet there is a compensating goodness of the soul.”¹²¹

At the end of June, with the first volume of Grant’s memoirs in page proofs, Twain went to Mount McGregor to supervise the final portion. One afternoon, with the voiceless Grant sitting in his porch wicker chair, Twain bantered with Buck and Jesse when the talk turned to James Fish, who had been sentenced the day before. Twain let loose a string of expletives, Jesse condemned his sentence as too light, and Buck engaged in angry oaths. Calmly taking up pad and pencil, Grant wrote, “He was not as bad as the other,” referring to Ferdinand Ward.¹²² Twain was amazed at Grant’s forbearance, writing that “he never uttered a phrase concerning Ward which an outraged adult might not have uttered concerning an offending child.”¹²³

The dying Grant exerted a powerful symbolic influence upon the American imagination, his illness becoming a grand pageant of North-South reconciliation. Nothing pleased him more than Confederate and Union soldiers alike expressing concern for his condition. On July 10, he received a surprise visit from his old friend Simon Buckner, who had unconditionally surrendered to him at Fort Donelson and wanted Grant to meet his new young wife. Now a Kentucky newspaper editor and soon to be governor, Buckner wished to convey the gratitude of Confederate soldiers who appreciated Grant’s magnanimity at Appomattox. In his written response, Grant attempted to find meaning in the war’s mass suffering: “I have witnessed since my sickness just what I have wished to see ever since the war: harmony and good feeling between the sections . . . I believe myself that the war was worth all it cost us, fearful as it was.”^{124 Grant emphasized his soldierly bond with Buckner. “The trouble is now made by men who did not go into the war at all, or who did not get mad till the war was over.”125 Although Buckner came as a private citizen, Grant urged him to publicize the visit and retire any residual rancor from the conflict.}

In this forgiving spirit, Grant summoned Benjamin Bristow, the crusading treasury secretary who had proven his scourge during the Whiskey Ring investigations. So embittered had Grant been toward Bristow that when he later ran into him in New York, he cut him dead, turning on his heels and walking away in silence. Nevertheless, Bristow set aside his hurt feelings and heeded Grant’s invitation. As soon as he arrived, Grant unburdened himself with a forthright apology. “I want to tell you that I misjudged you,” he murmured. “I thought you were after Babcock to get me, and my administration. I was wrong, and you were right.”^{126 Bristow was flabbergasted by this contrition from a dying man. Years later he said Grant “never had a more loyal friend or one who labored more zealously to serve him personally & officially.”127 The one person Grant didn’t summon to his bedside was Elihu Washburne, who he believed had betrayed him during the 1880 nomination battle in Chicago.}

In his final days, Grant extended an especially warm welcome to Colonel John Eaton, who had been charged with relief and resettlement of blacks during the war. Grant’s face was shrouded by a cloth and Eaton could see little of his features. Grant beckoned him closer with wiggling fingers, then scrawled a message. “I am very glad to see you . . . I should like to have you say something about our . . . utilizing the negroes down about Grand Junction, Tennessee. In writing on that subject for my book I had to rely on memory.”^{128 Eaton found it infinitely touching that Grant had devoted space to that story alongside the epic chronicle of his own military victories.}

Grant believed a special providence kept him alive to complete his book. He was so intent on finishing it that he instructed Fred, if he died and the manuscript wasn’t ready for the printer, he should embalm his body and delay the funeral to wrap it up. “This is now my great interest in life,” he wrote, “to see my work done.”^{129 On July 16, he put down his pen, his mighty labor over, and informed Dr. Douglas that he was “not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”130 Somehow, in agony, he had produced 336,000 splendid words in the span of a year. He had made a career of comebacks and this one was arguably his most impressive as he battled against mortality to preserve his legacy and protect Julia. Once again he had thoroughly conquered adversity. For Grant, the end of writing now meant the end of life. He took the farewell letter he addressed to his wife on June 29 and placed it in his coat pocket along with a lock of Jesse’s hair and the ring Julia had given him, knowing she would discover these items after his death.}

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, widely viewed as a masterpiece, is probably the foremost military memoir in the English language, written in a clear, supple style that transcends the torment of its composition. Grant recognized the implausible course of his life, beginning his preface with the humble words “Man proposes and God disposes.”^{131 He focused on his childhood, West Point, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, omitting his marriage, family life, presidency, Reconstruction, round-the-world trip, and post–White House political involvement. There was not a word about Ferdinand Ward. Grant projected the unassuming modesty, veined with irony, of a man confident of his own worth who didn’t need to bluster to other people. There was no posing, no striking of heroic attitudes, no pretense of being infallible. Scrupulously honest, Grant confessed to doubts and fears on the battlefield and presented the extraordinary spectacle of a self-effacing military man, a hero in spite of himself. An ambivalent message lay at the heart of the narrative. Grant was frankly insistent that the northern cause had been just, the southern misguided. Instead of settling scores, however, he stepped forth one last time as a gracious figure of national harmony.}

It never occurred to Grant to delve into embarrassing parts of his story, leading to some breathtaking evasions. He unashamedly skipped over the bleak St. Louis years in the 1850s and didn’t deal with his drinking problem. One of the most striking omissions was any mention of John Rawlins’s vital wartime role in keeping him sober. Perhaps it would be churlish to expect somebody gritting his teeth with pain to excavate such a painful past. Some Grant intimates thought he shrank from discussing Rawlins’s role because it would have entailed an admission of his own weakness. But it may also have been the case, as Twain argued, that Grant originally intended to include portraits of other generals, “but he got so many letters from colonels and such, asking to be added that he resolved to put none in and thus avoid the creation of jealousies.”¹³²

Praise for the Personal Memoirs was at first ambivalent. Henry James complained that Grant’s style was “hard and dry as sandpaper.”^{133 Matthew Arnold found the two volumes full of “sterling good-sense” and praised their prose for “saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.”134 In a less charitable moment, he faulted Grant for writing “an English without charm and high breeding.”135 But William Dean Howells found the book a revelation. “I am reading Grant’s book with the delight I fail to find in novels,” he told Mark Twain, who commended the work as “a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.”136 Twain had more than literary reasons to celebrate the book, which sold in excess of 300,000 two-volume sets. Seven months after Grant’s death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle.}

—

ON JULY 20, Ulysses S. Grant asked to be rolled over to a scenic spot on the mountaintop that offered a wide-angled vista of the Adirondack foothills to the north, the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, and the Catskills dimly visible to the south. Bundled up with a blanket over his lap, he was wheeled in a bath wagon that had two large wheels in the rear, a smaller one up front, which Harrison Terrell pushed from behind with a metal bar. A few weeks earlier, Terrell had pulled Grant up to the Hotel Balmoral, facetiously complaining he had been reduced to a draft horse, to which Grant scribbled: “For a man who has been accustomed to drive fast horses this is a considerable comedown in point of speed.”^{137 But this new outing lacked humor and left Grant gasping for air. “He was carried into the drawing room & death seemed to seize him,” said Reverend Newman. “We gathered around him & I prayed for him.”138}

As his life neared its end, Grant rested in a circle of family affection and his nine-year-old granddaughter Julia later sketched the scene:

Grandmama was crying quietly and was seated by his side. She had in her hands a handkerchief and a small bottle, perhaps of cologne, and was dampening my grandfather’s brow. His hair was longer and seemed to me more curled, while his eyes were closed in a face more drawn than usual and much whiter. Beads of perspiration stood on the broad forehead, and as I came forward, old Harrison gently wiped similar drops from the back of the hand which was lying quietly on the chair arm. My father [Fred] sat at the opposite side from Grandmama, and the doctor and nurse stood at the head, behind the invalid.¹³⁹

Characteristically the dying Grant was stoically concerned with his family’s well-being after he was gone, saying, “I hope no one will be distressed on my account.”^{140 He had already told pastor John Heyl Vincent, “I am ready to go. No Grant ever feared death. I am not afraid to die.”141 At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the Mexican War, saying that her husband had “died as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur.”142 Grant’s corpse weighed ninety pounds and lay under an oval picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was hard to believe this wizened form represented the earthly remains of the stouthearted general. “I think his book kept him alive several months,” Twain wrote upon hearing the news. “He was a very great man and superlatively good.”143 An undertaker rushed to preserve the body with ice before it decayed in the summer heat, embalming Grant under a George Washington portrait. The cadaver was attired in an outfit befitting a president—black suit, patent leather slippers, a little black bow tie—before being sealed under glass in a temporary coffin and covered with an American flag.}

For Julia, the desire to rest beside her husband for eternity became her paramount concern in choosing a burial spot. They had spent only a small portion of their lives in New York City, but had become assimilated residents. Grant had praised the town, stating that “through the generosity of [its] citizens I have been enabled to pass my last days without experiencing the pains of pinching want.”^{144 Many people wanted Grant interred at Arlington National Cemetery or the Soldiers’ Home in Washington and Galena even staked a claim. In opting for a New York tomb, Julia cited four factors: she believed it had been her husband’s preference; she could visit his tomb often; many Americans would be able to come; and—most important—she would be allowed a final resting place by his side. When local opposition arose to a pair of Central Park sites, Mayor William R. Grace suggested the “prominent height” and leafy tranquillity of the comparatively new Riverside Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, overlooking the Hudson River.145}

With flags lowered to half-mast across America and mourning symbols swathing the White House, the Grant family conducted a private funeral at Mount McGregor on August 4. Two days later Grant’s casket began a journey southward from Albany to New York City, where three hundred thousand people filed past the open coffin as it lay in state at City Hall. People descended on Manhattan in record numbers for the public funeral on August 8. They poured on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge, descended from elevated railroad stations, and slipped into the city through Grand Central Depot. The 1.5 million people flooding the city would make it the grandest funeral in New York history.

At 8:30 a.m. on August 8, Civil War veterans hoisted Grant’s coffin to a waiting catafalque that had black plumes sprouting at each corner. Twenty-four black stallions, arranged in twelve pairs and attended by black grooms, stood ready to pull the hearse. Twenty generals preceded the horses, led by Winfield Scott Hancock, whose vanity Grant had mocked and who now sat astride a noble black steed. Every protocol for a military funeral was followed, including the riderless horse with boots facing backward in the stirrups. The funeral was a vast, elaborate affair, befitting a monarch or head of state, in marked contrast to the essential simplicity of the man honored. The grandeur emphasized the central place that Grant had occupied in the Civil War and its aftermath. “Out of all the hubbub of the war,” wrote Walt Whitman, “Lincoln and Grant emerge, the towering majestic figures.”^{146 He thought they had lived exemplary lives that vindicated the American spirit, showing how people lifted from the lower ranks of society could attain greatness. “I think this the greatest lesson of our national existence so far.”147}

The procession streamed up Broadway until it reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square, where it took on a veritable army of dignitaries, including all the members of the Grant family except for Julia, who remained secluded at Mount McGregor. President Cleveland headed an eminent escort that included Vice President Thomas Hendricks, the entire cabinet, and Supreme Court justices. Both surviving ex-presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, attended. Congress and statehouses across the country emptied out to pay homage, sending fifteen U.S. senators, twelve congressmen, eighteen governors, and ten mayors to pay their respects. From city halls across America eight thousand civil and municipal officers converged to participate in the march.

Nobody doubted that William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan would serve as honorary pallbearers, but Julia Grant knew her husband would have wanted two Confederate generals to balance their northern counterparts, so Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner represented the South. Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. “It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drums marked Staunton, Va.,” one said. “They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops.”^{148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers, supplemented by eighteen thousand veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. Rabbi E. B. M. Browne acted as an honorary pallbearer, a reminder of how thoroughly Grant had atoned for his wartime action against the Jews. At Grant’s death, Philadelphia’s Jewish Record observed, “None will mourn his loss more sincerely than the Hebrew, and . . . in every Jewish synagogue and temple in the land the sad event will be solemnly commemorated with fitting eulogy and prayer.”149}

Southern reaction to Grant’s death signified a posthumous triumph. His onetime image as a fierce warrior of the Civil War had been replaced by that of a more pacific figure. As the News and Courier of South Carolina editorialized, “Had his life ended but a few years since, the mourning for the great leader would have been more or less sectional in its manifestation. Dying as he now dies, the grief is as widespread as the Union.”^{150 Grant had won over unlikely southern converts. When John Singleton Mosby learned of his death, he was bereft: “I felt I had lost my best friend.”151 In Gainesville, Georgia, a white-bewhiskered James Longstreet emerged in a dressing gown to tell a reporter emotionally that Grant “was the truest as well as the bravest man that ever lived.”152 In southern towns and border states, veterans from North and South linked arms as they paid tribute to Grant’s passage. Black churches held “meetings of sorrow” that eulogized Grant as a champion of the Fifteenth Amendment and the fight to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. Summing up Grant’s career, Frederick Douglass wrote: “In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”153}

Church bells tolled and muffled drums resounded as the funeral procession glided past buildings shrouded in black, The New York Times likening the uninterrupted flow of humanity to a giant “river into which many tributaries were poured.”^{154 The honor guard of mourners stretched for miles, taking five hours to reach the burial site. Like a wraith haunting the crowd, a slim, pale young man, his identity masked by smoked glasses, watched as the canopied hearse rolled by. He was, by his own description, America’s most hated man. It was Ferdinand Ward, still awaiting trial, who had bribed his way out of the Ludlow Street Jail for several hours to attend the funeral. Ward remained unrepentant, preferring to see himself as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the Grant & Ward scandal. He remained totally delusional about his relationship with Grant. “Our friendship never changed through all the period of stress and trouble,” he told the press years later, “but remained until the time of his death.”155 The anger of Grant’s family and friends toward Ward and Fish had never abated. “Wall Street killed him,” Sherman stated baldly. “There isn’t any doubt about it. He would have been alive to-day, if he hadn’t fallen into the hands of Ward and those fellows.”156}

By midafternoon, in bright sunshine, the funeral cortege reached the small temporary brick tomb at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street. Warships floating in the Hudson River let loose a cannonade in tribute to Grant. A lone bugler blew taps at the vault—the same tune that had floated over Grant’s army camps during the war. As the notes drifted over the crowd, Sherman stood ramrod straight, his body shaking with tears. It was a memorable sight: the bête noire of the South, seemingly impervious to softer feelings, overcome with profound emotion.

A dozen years later, on a cool spring day, with more than a million people in attendance, President William McKinley presided over the dedication of the General Grant National Memorial—“Grant’s Tomb” in popular parlance—financed by public contributions. Leading the fund-raising drive had been the lawyer Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard College, which would have pleased Grant. An opulent domed affair of granite and marble, Grant’s Tomb was the largest mausoleum in North America. When Julia Grant died of heart failure in 1902 at age seventy-six—in later years she befriended Varina Davis, the widow of Jefferson Davis, and supported the suffragette movement—she and Ulysses were entombed together. They lay encased in red granite sarcophagi housed in an open structure much too monumental for these two simple midwestern souls. The mausoleum’s spectacular scale testified to Grant’s exalted place in the nineteenth-century American mind, perhaps rivaling that of Lincoln, and the site soon evolved into New York’s number one tourist destination, drawing half a million people annually.

Perhaps nobody had watched the funeral procession on August 8, 1885, with a wider range of emotions than Mark Twain, who stared down for five hours on the somber pageantry from the windows of his publishing office at Union Square. He would always be indescribably proud to have published Grant’s Personal Memoirs, even though its commercial success distracted him from his own writing career. At the end of the funeral, when the crowds had dispersed, he and William Tecumseh Sherman retreated to the Lotos Club, where they sat down over liquor and cigars to wrestle anew with the mystery of Grant’s personality—a source of never-ending wonder to both men. Sherman always insisted that Grant was a mystery even to himself, a unique intermingling of strength and weakness such as he had never encountered before.

Now he said categorically to Twain that Grant had no peer as a military genius: “Never anything like it before.”^{157 Perhaps sensing that the man would soon harden into a monument, with the rich flavor of his personality lost to posterity, Sherman laughed at the chaste image of Grant purveyed by the newspapers. “The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language & indelicate stories!” he thundered in disbelief. “Why Grant was full of humor, & full of the appreciation of it.” He recalled how Grant would roar with mirth at the salty, off-color stories peddled by Senator James W. Nye of Nevada. “It makes me sick—that newspaper nonsense. Grant was no namby-pamby fool; he was a man—all over—rounded & complete.”158 The comment made Twain realize that in supervising the Memoirs, he had failed to press Grant on one key point that would have completed the human portrait and now he kicked himself for this critical omission: Grant had not addressed his struggle with alcohol. It was a contest, Twain reckoned, as huge as any of the titanic battles he had fought and won. “I wish I had thought of it!” Twain exclaimed with frustration. “I would have said to General Grant, ‘Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs—& the repentance & reform. Trust the people.’”159 But he knew that no hint of that existed in the narrative, that it had been too sore a point with Grant, who, in his quiet, inscrutable way, carried his private thoughts on the subject to the grave.}