XXVIII

TO WRITE A BOOK: TO BE A MAN

He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the test of greatness.

—Herman Melville

Grant’s whole character was a mystery even to himself—a combination of strength and weakness not paralleled by any of whom I have read in Ancient or Modern History….

—William Tecumseh Sherman

IN LONG BRANCH in the summer of 1884, Ulysses Grant, at sixty-two years and 186 pounds, was thirty pounds overweight; his lameness, which stubbornly would not go away, was a typical ailment of the late-nineteenth-century gentleman who no longer got the exercise he needed. One day at lunch, Grant complained of great pain in his throat as he ate a peach. It seemed a minor matter at the time, but it was not just an annoyance; it was a sign of cancer. For the next year, the nation watched its greatest hero die.

Still relatively young, Grant was to hear the sound of a crowd assembled in his honor only once more. At the close of each summer, Ocean Grove, the Methodist camp-meeting colony south of Long Branch, held a week of revival services. One of Grant’s rich Philadelphia friends, George H. Stuart, an inveterate evangelical Christian who had sponsored every good cause from freedom for slaves to fresh-air vacations for poor city children, invited the general to a reunion in Ocean Grove of the veterans of the Civil War’s Christian Commission. The commission, kin to the Young Men’s Christian Association, had provided spiritual and morale-raising services during the war. Stuart was proud indeed when the general agreed to attend still another ceremonial remembrance of wartime days.

Ten thousand people crowded down rush-matted sloping aisles to find folding chairs in the great tentlike structure that was the Ocean Grove auditorium, where the seaside revivals were held. Grant, still lame, came onto the platform leaning on Stuart’s arm and made his way slowly to his chair. As he did so the “vast congregation” rose to its feet and “cheered with a vigor and a unanimity very uncommon in a religious assemblage.” After a prayer and hymn, a Methodist preacher who had been a private during the war saluted him: “I was one of a million of your soldiers…,” and Stuart helped Grant to his feet. Almost inaudibly he said his thanks. The auditorium at Ocean Grove is a strangely affecting place; George W. Childs, who was present that summer evening, wrote that Grant “after saying a few words…utterly broke down, and the tears trickled on his cheeks. That was the last time he appeared in public.”¹

Julia’s health, not his own, was on the general’s mind early in September when he wrote a charming letter to a grandchild, Nellie’s daughter, “My Dear Little Pet Vivian,” full of news about the comings and goings of her cousins at the seaside cottage. He reported that “Grandma has been sick in bed for two days. But the Doctor says that it will not last long. She gets dizzy when she sits up, but feels very well when she is laying down. The Doctor says she does not take enough exercise. I think you will say so too.” As for “Grand-pa,” he was “writing his campaigns which he intends to publish in a book. It will,” he predicted, “probably be a year yet before it will be ready.” In his thinking, it was already a book.²

Julia’s illness did indeed prove minor, but Grant’s friends were greatly concerned about his throat, and George Childs arranged for him to see a Philadelphia physician, the first of many specialists to examine and prescribe for Grant as the disease progressed. This physician referred Grant to a New York doctor, but he was in Europe. When the Grants moved back to New York City in the fall and Grant finally went to see still a third doctor, John H. Douglas, the cancer was at least three months old. Surgery in 1884 was sufficiently advanced so that a carcinoma of the soft palate, the affected part of the throat, could have been completely excised. Late in the summer or very early in the fall the growth would have been about the size of a pea, on the surface, and removable. By the time Douglas entered the case, the growth must have been larger, perhaps as large as a plum, and deeply embedded in the tissue, and the chances for a successful operation and cure were slight. The doctor recalled that after the examination Grant asked if it was “cancer.” Lying only to the extent that he did not use Grant’s accurate word, Douglas replied, “General, the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured.” “Epithelial,” as the doctor used it, meant that unwanted cells lined the soft palate, but as both men were aware, the term was a euphemism for “cancerous.” Grant knew what he was up against.³

He was going to die, and he was going to write a book. When Grant made his plans for writing in the fall of 1884, they included Adam Badeau. Badeau was a professional writer, and Grant trusted his judgment. Badeau had read the Shiloh and Vicksburg articles in manuscript that summer, and his comments had been helpful. Now, back in New York, Grant wrote on October 2 asking Badeau to come to the city, stay with them at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street, and work alongside him. Badeau happily accepted, but said he wanted to remain in the Adirondacks until he finished his own book, an exposé of diplomatic corruption in Cuba. On October 8, Grant wrote again; he had two articles that he would like Badeau to read, and though he said they could “rest two weeks longer,” there was a restrained note of impatience in the note as he added, “But I will be glad to see you when you are ready to come…. There will be room for you and me both in my room. If there is not [,] a table can be put up in your bed-room.”⁴

Adam Badeau was the strangest of the strange men who were close to Ulysses Grant. Born in New York City in 1831 and educated well in private schools, he was a skilled writer; his volume of essays, The Vagabond, contains interesting pieces on Charlotte Brontë, Edwin Booth (with whom Badeau spent an astonishing night in the rarely opened country house of Booth’s father), George Bancroft, and “Myself.” He went to war, served on the staff of General Thomas W. Sherman, and was wounded at Port Hudson. In 1864, he joined Grant’s staff, and took part in the Wilderness campaign. An accomplished military historian, he published his three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant in 1882. This was followed after Grant’s death by his Grant in Peace: From Appomattox to Mount McGregor. Subtitled A Personal Memoir, this book is an odd collection of gossipy sketches concerning Grant’s relationships with such diverse acquaintances as Sheridan, Stanton, Gladstone, Fish, and Romero. Since Badeau was away from Washington during most of Grant’s presidency, the book includes almost no political history. There is neither acute analysis nor a firm narrative strand, and one is left knowing little of either Grant or Badeau.

Badeau was probably a homosexual, and in a world that accorded him limited license to express himself, he chose a derivative existence, being endlessly fascinated by society. His correspondence with his intimate friend Benjamin Moran, secretary of the legation in London, is awash with duchesses. He also allowed himself to enjoy the petty pleasure of hoisting himself up by cutting others down. His Grant in Peace is full of judgments on the gaucheries of people he met in Washington, such as the wife of the British minister: “Her ladyship, you see, was born in the middle class.” In the winter preceding Grant’s inaugural, when gossip about the new president was in great demand, Badeau chanced to be staying in the same boardinghouse in which Henry Adams had modest bachelor quarters. They shared a dining table, and Adams, pressing Badeau on one of his favorite subjects—Grant—did not fail to observe Badeau keenly at the same time. He found him “exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent.” Impatient for place, Badeau “resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patron, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the General.”⁵

It is hard indeed to know why Grant was drawn to Badeau; the 105 letters that Grant wrote to him—and that Badeau proudly printed in Grant in Peace—are devoid of any hint of intimacy. But apparently Badeau was one of the members of Grant’s staff who somehow managed to make Grant comfortable without in any way being a threat to him, one of those who could perhaps sense his power (and think they understood it), but were not in any way a psychological obstruction to him. Badeau was on Grant’s army staff in 1869 and after the inaugural moved into the White House, living there until he won a consulship. Whether in army headquarters, the White House, or a legation office in some foreign land, Badeau was happy to run errands for Grant, and Grant felt comfortable asking him to do so. And the critical clue to understanding the difficult relationship between the two men is that both were writers.

Badeau did not pick up Grant’s oblique hint that he was doing his own work; instead, he arrived hoping to win immortality by putting into literary form the words of the dying general. It did not occur to him that Grant could write a book. Despite the claim he had made to Henry Adams, Badeau never quite understood Grant. Indeed, he told Adams that during the war he and Rawlins and others on the staff “could never follow a mental process in his [Grant’s] thought. They were not sure that he did think.” It would have been closer to the truth to say that Grant himself did not know what he thought until he wrote it. Perhaps he should have banished cabinet meetings, as he had councils of war, and governed by penciled notes of instruction. For whether Grant could think or not, he could write—better than Badeau, in a style that was inimitable.⁶

The Grants’ house on Sixty-sixth Street was beautifully placed, one door in from Fifth Avenue and in sight of Central Park. It was the solid reliable house the general and Julia had looked for all their lives. There was nothing strange about it. It had not the hand-crafted homemade quality of Hardscrabble, not the silly unreality of those subscription houses in Galena and Philadelphia and Washington, and none of the official nonsense of the White House. It was closest to the fine little house on High Street in Galena where they had lived so briefly in 1860–61. The New York house said that someone successful and stable lived in it. A sturdy flight of steps led up to the front door; inside were parlors and a dining room (with kitchen and servants’ rooms below). On the second floor were good bedrooms for Julia and Ulysses, who had to have a separate room because of his illness, and at the front a fine study in which he did his writing. On the third floor were bedrooms for Ida and Fred and their children; on the fourth was space for servants and overflow grandchildren.

Grant sat at a large square table in the front room on the second floor, and worked with wonderful steadiness mornings and afternoons. Pain and doctors interrupted him, and so did a swirl of children and grandchildren, but nothing diverted him from his work. And no other person was indispensable to it. Even Badeau soon found that he was not necessary. With a clerk’s mind, Colonel Fred was able to gather sources his father needed, and look up facts; Julia’s eyes were weak, but the rest of the family were willing to read portions aloud, and both they and Julia could comment on them. Badeau could give good professional judgment on the manuscript as it progressed. He was useful, but not indispensable. The irritability his old friend Adams had spotted years ago reappeared; he came to resent and even to hate Fred, and he quarreled with Julia. When Nellie arrived in March, his bedroom was needed, and Badeau moved out of the house. By then, he had predicted (accurately) that Grant’s book would compete with his own Military History of Ulysses S. Grant, published more than two years earlier. He was jealous not only of Fred and of Julia, but also, increasingly, of Samuel Clemens, who usurped his role as chief adviser. And Badeau was envious of the general himself. His own professional skill was not enough for him to dominate Grant in the writing world. If Badeau’s work was good, Grant’s, in a sense that Badeau refused to recognize or acknowledge, was great.

In November, far from having given up trying to have an imprint on events, Grant wrote a businesslike letter to John Russell Young in China, endorsing a trading venture in the Far East and stating, obviously for public consumption, “I believe…it is to the advantage of both China and Japan to look to the United States for anything which they must go abroad for.” We, not the “strong European powers,” should be getting that trade. Then, turning from commerce to politics and to more personal observations, he wrote, “Our election is over…the democratic party is to be restored…after…twenty-four years. It is to be seen now ‘what they do with it.’” He said somewhat dutifully that he thought Blaine could have done a good job as president but, recalling another nominee of another day, observed that he thought Blaine’s nomination a mistake, as there “has been no election since ’72 when the republicans could have won so easily.”⁷

Grant had an idea who might have done better at winning than Blaine, but politics were now behind him and the book lay ahead. He did not, however, have good arrangements for its publication. Back in September, he had told a grandchild of his writings, which he intended to publish “in a book”; at about the same time, on George Childs’s porch at Long Branch, he asked Roswell Smith, president of the Century Company, with a certain guile, “Do you really think anyone would be interested in a book by me?” Would anyone read Napoleon on Austerlitz? thought Smith, and he urged Grant to complete his work. When the publisher left Long Branch, he thought he had a deal, but he was not sure enough of the book to offer an advance. Smith reported to his associates, “When the book is ready he is to come to see us with it.” He thought he had Grant sewed up.⁸

Smith, however, had not reckoned with one of the era’s sharpest buccaneers, a man who had shown his knowledge of the ways of the world in his own brilliant writings about its follies. That man—Samuel Clemens—was magnificently contemptuous of those who made their living as the publishers of books, precisely because he was so anxious to make sure that his own particular living, for Mrs. Clemens and himself, was a handsome one. In November, he got wind not only that his friend’s book was going well but also that the people at the company that published Century Magazine were offering a good deal less than he and, one guesses, Grant thought it was worth, and he paid a call at Sixty-sixth Street.

In his wickedly triumphant account of how he bested the Century people, Clemens collapsed months of hard negotiating into two days. While suggesting that it was he who rescued Grant from a naive fall into Century’s hands, he ignored the fact that the general was shopping around among several other publishers. One wonders, in fact, just who was conning whom in the conversations between Grant and Clemens. (Surely the core of the attraction which Ulysses Grant held for Samuel Clemens lay not in Grant’s fame, although that mattered, but in Clemens’s perception that he, and he alone, had been smart enough to figure out that Grant was no dumber than Tom Sawyer. Which is to say, not dumb at all—just stranded in a world that did not make much sense.) After he looked at the offer Century had made, Clemens said, he “explained that these terms would never do…. Strike out the ten per cent and put twenty per cent in its place. Better still, put seventy-five…. The General demurred, and quite decidedly. He said they would never pay those terms.”⁹

Undaunted, Clemens argued his case strenuously, claiming Century’s offer was an outrage to “such a colossus as General Grant.” This was flattering talk; nevertheless, the idea of renegotiating the contract “distressed General Grant,” who began wondering if, in fact, he had given Smith his word that Century would get the book. Grant, continued Clemens, thought this new contract proposal

placed him in the attitude of a robber—robber of a publisher. I said that if he regarded that as a crime it was because his education was limited. I said it was not a crime and was always rewarded in heaven with two halos. Would be, if it ever happened.

The General was immovable and challenged me to name the publisher that would be willing to have this noble deed perpetrated upon him. I named the American Publishing Company of Hartford. He asked if I could prove my position. I said I could furnish the proof by telegraph in six hours—three hours for my despatch to go to Hartford, three hours for…jubilant acceptance to return by the same electric gravel train—that if he needed this answer quicker I would walk up to Hartford and fetch it.

Grant was right to be skeptical, for the American Publishing Company turned down the proposal. As Clemens chose to recall it: “I was fully expecting to presently hand that book to…[them] and enrich that den of reptiles—but the sober second thought came then. I reflected that the company had been robbing me for years and building theological factories out of the proceeds and that now was my chance to feed fat the ancient grudge I bore them.”¹⁰

To exercise these urges he was already establishing his own publishing firm, Charles L. Webster & Company, to bring out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why he offered to give Grant’s manuscript to the American Publishing Company is not clear; there was money to be made with the book, and now he offered Grant a $10,000 advance and talked of 75 percent royalties. Century, perhaps with an eye to the problems of finishing a dying man’s book, had insisted that extraordinary costs would have to come out of Grant’s share of the profits. These costs Clemens agreed to take on “out of my fourth.” Grant was intrigued: “He laughed…and asked me what my profit out of that remnant would be. I said, a hundred thousand dollars in six months.”¹¹

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant has had an interesting history. Clemens, who cannot be said to have been disinterested, claimed that the general’s account of his campaigns was the greatest writing by a military man since Caesar wrote about Gaul. His subscription men crossed the country offering the volumes in a choice of three handsome bindings at three prices. Some of the better salesmen had pages of actual manuscript, with Grant’s corrections penciled on them, bound in hard covers into a dummy book to use as an enticement. If the sales are calculated at an average of $5 a set for 300,000 sets, the gross income would have been $1,500,000. Out of this would have come the production costs and the commissions paid to the subscription men. Julia Grant is said to have received between $420,000 and $450,000, suggesting that the figure in the final contract was 30 percent for the Grants, which yielded certainly much more than $100,000 for the benevolent Mr. Clemens. The result was an astonishing number of two-volume sets sitting proudly on parlor tables in America in the 1880’s. And what was more, the prose in the book was never totally forgotten. Gertrude Stein read hers and, with her penchant for strong people and taut prose, pronounced for Grant. Clemens was proud of the book on both literary and commercial grounds. He had the great satisfaction of writing the largest royalty check ever written, $200,000 payable to Julia Grant on February 27, 1886.

But in the fall of 1884 that was in the future; Ulysses Grant, with the prospect of munificent success but still without a contract, and in increasingly precarious health, pursued his writing. Late in November, in a slightly shaky hand, he wrote Nellie what must have been an exceedingly distressing letter for his daughter to receive. Except for a reference to an enclosed sample of lace from a dress that Julia was sending with Levi Morton, almost the whole of his note read, “I am still very lame and otherwise suffering. I have had a sore throat now for more than four months, and latterly I have been suffering from neuralgia. Last Friday I had three large double teeth pulled which I hope will cure the neuralgia, and the Doctor is making fair progress with the sore throat. The lameness is gradually improving.” There were already rumors in the newspapers of his ill health, and they were confirmed in December by Grant’s own candor when he wrote E. F. Beale, a slight acquaintance, saying that his painful throat made it impossible to keep an engagement in Hot Springs. Beale chose to document his intimacy with the general by releasing the note to a reporter, and Grant’s illness was public. The cancer had not kept him from his writing, and the negotiations for the publication of his book went on. In November Samuel Clemens had proposed that Grant drop the Century people but the general was not yet won over to Clemens as his publisher, but unwittingly, Clemens had given his friend the confidence to raise the ante. In December, Grant wrote Andrew Carnegie, who had intervened in Scribner’s behalf, that he could not sign a contract with that house without at least giving Century the chance to match it. Grant said the book would probably be finished by May, if it were not for his troubling health. He was, nonetheless, convinced that he would indeed finish it.¹²

In January 1885, Julia completed difficult arrangements with William H. Vanderbilt; as a result, he forgave his $150,000 loan, and the ceremonial gifts from the Grants’ trip around the world were left in his possession (inaccessible to creditors), with the proviso that they go to the nation on Grant’s death. The agreement meant both solvency and an end to the worrisome business of bankruptcy, but Julia, with no other business to do and no intellectual activity available to her, was left with fewer resources during the long months of the disease than her husband. He, though in pain and aware of the likelihood of his death, had the writing of his book to occupy him. In February he wrote Nellie that the throat condition—he never after the first instance called it cancer—was “very serious,” that he had lost thirty pounds and had to see his doctors twice a day.

It would be very hard for me to be confined to the house…if it was not that I have become interested in the work which I have undertake[n]. It will take several months yet to complete the writing of my campaigns. The indications now are that the book will be in two volumes of about four hundred and fifty pages each. I give a condensed biography of my life up to the breaking out of the rebellion. If you ever take the time to read it you will find out what a boy and man I was before you knew me. I do not know whether my book will be interesting to other people or not, but all the publishers want to get it, and I have had larger offers than have ever been made for a book before. Fred helps me greatly in my work. He does all the copying, and looks up references for me.

A few days later Julia, distraught, wrote an old friend (herself close to death), “Genl Grant’s health is our absorbing thought. Genl Grant is very, very ill. I cannot write how ill—my tears blind me.” Grant himself had just told Nellie, “We have all been as happy as could be expected considering our great losses and my personal suffering. Philosophers profess to believe that what is is for the best. I hope it may prove so with our family.” The “what is” for Ulysses S. Grant was not only his dying but his book, and now there was a real danger that he would not be able to finish it. The day he wrote Nellie, he had been to Dr. Douglas’s office and had caught cold; thereafter he was treated at home. The ulceration of his throat grew much worse. In late February, a retinue of specialists confirmed that “the disease was epitheloma, or epithelial cancer of the malignant type, that was sure to end fatally.” What Grant was told is not known, but he knew he was dying. Early in March he talked to Badeau about completing the book if he left it unfinished, but Clemens, although greatly distressed by his friend’s appearance, expressed his faith that Grant would rally and finish it himself. And admirably, Clemens went ahead with the contract.¹³

Although exceedingly weak, Grant kept on writing. One day, as Clemens was chatting with him (and a sculptor Clemens admired worked on a fine bust of the general) Badeau came in, said, “I’ve been reading what you wrote this morning,” and went on to compliment Grant for having made clear a wartime event that all other accounts had left in a muddle. There were, however, days when Grant could not work at all, and on March 26, he reached a dangerous point in his illness. An attempt to rally his spirits with a carriage ride through the park with his old friend Matias Romero produced fatigue instead. That evening, he had to give a deposition for the trial of James D. Fish, and Dr. Douglas complained the next morning that the lawyers had dangerously tired his patient. Indeed, on March 28 the doctors expected Grant to die. The family gathered, while an ostentatious and unctuous Methodist clergyman, John P. Newman, who had wormed his way into the family’s confidence and persuaded them of the efficacy of baptism, performed this rite. Grant’s sister Mary had devoutedly prayed for her brother’s conversion, but he had been assiduously indifferent. Now too weak to resist, he submitted to the ceremony, which later was widely acclaimed as having prolonged his life. On the same day he received the ministrations of the notable divine, Grant was also treated by Dr. George F. Shrady, and he rallied. Shrady later laconically recorded his judgment as to what had saved the general: “I was inclined to attribute the result to the brandy.”¹⁴

One painful aspect of his disease in this period was severe coughing and vomiting, and Grant’s debilitation was so great that it is difficult to account for the remarkable improvement in his condition which occurred. One medical scholar hypothesizes that “Grant bled into his tumor, this hemorrhage resulted in the death of many tumor cells, and Grant coughed up a lot of blood with dead cancer cells, vomited out a lot of blood with dead cancer cells, and probably also swallowed a lot of blood with dead and living cancer cells.” This violent activity resulted, after the bleeding stopped, in a cancerous mass in the soft palate that was considerably smaller and less painful than it had been.¹⁵

In April, Grant was markedly better. He could go for drives, dine with the family, visit with friends, and work on his book. And the book became more and more important to him. Finally, there was something to be done that was worth doing. All the failures of his first forty years and the terrible successes of the next four, which had been given gaudy celebration for almost twenty more, yielded to a splendid struggle to create the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. He pressed himself, not to write, for that he did with disconcerting ease, but to finish the book before he died. There was simple Grant logic in his determination. He was performing this task to support the family, and, of absolutely essential importance, there was fulfillment for him in the nature of the job itself. A cynic could say that without Donelson, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness and, of course, Appomattox, there could have been no book. He would be right. But neither would there have been a book—a good strong book—without Grant’s magnificent eye and his clear rendering of what he saw into words. All his life he had struggled to get his story out, to get his life laid out before himself and before the world, so that in some way it could matter. Now—and only now—he succeeded.

The choice of publisher was announced by his son on March 2, 1885, in a businesslike letter sent to the rival houses which had lost the chance to publish the book: “Genl Grant’s book will be published by Chas. L. Webster & Co.” George Childs had come up from Philadelphia, reviewed the various offers, and, according to Clemens, pronounced, “Give the book to Clemens.”¹⁶

William T. Sherman was no man for a euphemism: “I am sure Dr. Douglas told me there was no cancer—but Dr. Alexander says it is cancer, that it will gradually prevent his taking sufficient food, that he will gradually waste away and die.” Sherman, without growing maudlin, regretted that he was no longer close to Grant personally; his concern for his old friend was great nevertheless, and he summed it up with his customary firmness: “I think it a matter of vital importance that he should complete his Memoirs.” A year later Sherman wrote his nephew not to pay any attention to General Buell’s anti-Grant account of Shiloh: “Let it fail still born. Thousands—millions—will read Grant’s simple account who may never have the patience to compare the two accounts.” He was referring not so much to Grant’s article on the battle in the Century Magazine as to the Memoirs, which he knew would last.¹⁷

Grant matched Sherman in the ruthless realism with which he appraised his own illness and coming death. On June 17, he wrote a magnificent memorandum to his doctor, in which he told Douglas that he would die of “hemorage, strangulation, or exhaustion,” and with mordant wit, gave the physician permission to bring in still another expert if “you are unwilling to have me go without consultation.” He did, however, let Douglas know that he dreaded “more Drs. & more treatment & more suffering.” It would have been splendid if such honesty from a man bent on so honest a task could have been rewarded by a dignified time in which to write and to die. Grant was not so lucky; first there was the business of Adam Badeau’s jealousy of the book, and second there was the tinsel unreality of the place chosen for dying.¹⁸

On April 19, 1885, the New York World ran a column of gossip about Grant that included this statement: “Another false idea of Gen. Grant is given out by some of his friends, and that is that he is a writer. He is not a writer…. The work upon his new book about which so much has been said is the work of Gen. Adam Badeau.” Samuel Clemens, furious, was ready to sue for libel. Grant worked for three hours on a letter to Charles L. Webster & Company, intended for publication, in which he discussed the charges made in the World and quietly stated, “The composition is entirely my own.” Grant’s statement appeared in the New York Tribune and the New York Sun on May 6. Meanwhile, on May 2, Badeau, with perverse perseverance, wrote Grant asking for additional payment for his services. Believing Fred would intercept the letter, he came to the house to present it to Grant himself. Badeau knew that advance sales were going well, and he wanted a thousand dollars a month to finish the book and 10 percent of the profits.¹⁹

On May 5, Grant wrote Badeau, “…you and I must give up all association as far as the preparation of any literary work goes which is to bear my signature.” The controversy over whether he was able to write at all had stimulated Grant to prove he could. He admitted that Badeau had helped him in the writing, and that when he had been so ill in March he had expected Badeau to have to finish the book, but now, while saying he hoped they could remain friends, Grant warned that if the book was unfinished when he died, and Badeau insisted on completing it, he would face the enmity of the family. What was more, Grant intended to finish the book himself, and he rejected out of hand Badeau’s claim to a percentage of the royalties. In 1888, Badeau sued the family for a share in the profits, and tried to cast Fred Grant in the role of the villain who had destroyed his relationship with the General. It was a thoroughly disagreeable and unsuccessful suit, but it came three years after Ulysses Grant could be touched by it.²⁰

Summer was coming—Grant guessed it would be his last—and people outside of his family had thoughts about where he should spend it. As one gentleman put it: “I thought if we could get him to come to Mount McGregor, and if he should die there, it might make the place a national shrine—and incidentally a success.” The real-estate promoter was talking about a cottage on the grounds of his resort hotel, Balmoral, a few miles north of Saratoga Springs in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Shoddy exploitation followed Grant right to the grave. He was already the enshrined hero of a noble cause and the wayward antihero of sham values.²¹

W. J. Arkell, an upstate New York butcher whose business had thrived, had gone into Republican politics and into other ventures as well; these included publication of the Albany Evening Journal and, in 1881, resort real estate. After the Civil War, Saratoga Springs had become the most fashionable mountain resort in the country, and exploitation of the lovely country to the north was in full flower. Joining in, Arkell built a narrow-gauge railroad that ran twelve miles from Saratoga Springs to Mount McGregor and then up a spectacularly steep grade to the summit, where he built the Hotel Balmoral, opened for the 1884 season. The resort was modeled on the successful and beautiful Mohonk Mountain House, farther down the Hudson Valley; rustic gazebos were placed along gently sloping paths where slow-paced overdressed walkers could pause and admire lovely vistas. There were lakes below, and the Saratoga battlefield, and to the north and west the mountain peaks of the Adirondacks. The Mount McGregor Art Association was already in existence in 1883, and on its walls were Thomas Moran’s Hiawatha and, impressively for so new a gallery, one of the most famous of the paintings by the Grants’ favorite artist, Albert Bierstadt—The Rocky Mountains, bought for $1,500. In June 1885, advertisements appeared for “Hotel Balmoral, 1200 feet above the sea, on Mount McGregor…(‘No Dew, No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, Certain Relief from Hay Fever.’)”²²

In 1885, Joseph W. Drexel of New York City, the younger brother of the head of the banking firm which had long curried Grant’s favor, bought a cottage that had been moved to make room for the Balmoral. Apparently Drexel, who summered in Saratoga Springs, thought of occupying it himself, but Arkell had a better idea. Drexel had known Grant both socially and commercially in Long Branch and in New York—he was the first man Grant approached when he took up a subscription for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Would it not, Arkell suggested to Drexel, be beneficial to the great general to get to the mountain air and relieve his suffering? And would this not make a success of the Balmoral, in which both the rich man from New York and the more newly rich man from Canajoharie had invested?

Inexplicably, the Grants had decided to sell the lovely cottage in Long Branch. On April 19 the New York Tribune reported that they would summer in the Catskills, but a week later the destination was changed: “In the morning W. J. Arkell called and arranged definitely with the family for taking General Grant to Mount McGregor….” By June 14 the hot weather had begun to bother the general, who was already suffering greatly. The cancer had become rooted in deeper tissue, his neck was swollen, and he found it painful and difficult to speak. William H. Vanderbilt lent his railroad car, and on June 16 the general, Julia, Fred and Ida, Nellie, Dr. Douglas, Henry McQueeney (Grant’s nurse), Harrison Tyrrell (his valet), and Julia’s maid left Grand Central Station, traveled up the east side of the Hudson—in sight of West Point—crossed below Albany, and reached Saratoga Springs.²³

All along the way, groups of people crowded the local stations to watch the great general in his splendid railroad car go by. At Saratoga Springs, he was cheered when, unaided, he got out and stepped over to the narrow-gauge railroad car that would take him to Mount McGregor. In a few minutes he stepped out again, exasperated by the bumbling efforts of Fred and the porters to transfer the huge chair in which he slept and the chair on which he propped his feet. The furniture finally in place, they moved on once more. The short final leg of the journey was a far cry from the trip Grant had made so long ago when, in pain from his injured leg, he had traveled alone in a railroad car from Nashville toward Chattanooga. This was a macabre holiday excursion. Drexel was aboard, as were reporters from newspapers all over the country, and Arkell “was thoughtfully attentive to all on the train over which he exercised supervision.”²⁴

Thomas M. Pitkin, in his admirable account of Grant’s days at Mount McGregor, tells of Grant’s annoyance with the smoke that wafted back into his railroad car from the little engine struggling up the mountain. Grant’s car lurched as the grade-gaining curves were accomplished, and it was with considerable relief that he got out and, ignoring a hospital litter, made his way on foot to the ample, but not grand, cottage. There he found a good porch on three sides, which shaded and darkened the “reception room”—a correct term, as it turned out. The cottage’s main room had been hastily converted from rusticity with veneers and wallpaper. The woodwork was pale blue, the new brick fireplace was Tuscan red, and the ceiling paper was “radiant with gold stars.” On the figured carpet was a large sturdy writing table covered with green baize. Grant’s bedroom, also newly papered and curtained, was on the first floor, as was Julia’s room and that of Harrison Tyrrell. There were six rooms on the second floor for the rest of the family.²⁵

Surely Grant had earned a rest, but he was tired of resting, of being out of sight. The crowds of people along the train’s route all day had stimulated him. Instead of going straight into the house, he sat on the porch and visited with Drexel; then he went in, changed into a dress coat and top hat, and came out again. On display, he sat on the porch with others of the party until the supposedly nonexistent mosquitoes drove him inside. That porch became, in fact, as photographed as any in American history. Picture after picture shows the Grant family there, ridiculously overdressed in the best fashion of the day: Julia and her daughter and daughters-in-law in silk and bent-brimmed hats, the men in dress coats, and the general always with an excellent silk top hat and—the only sensible garment on display—a scarf at his neck. Nellie, whose three children were in England, had been with her father and mother since spring. Fred and Ida, who had established themselves as the premier branch of the family, were present with their two children—Julia, age nine, and Ulysses S. Grant, four. Jesse and his wife, Elizabeth, and their daughter, Nellie, who was nearly four, were also at Mount McGregor.^*

The family at Mount McGregor, 1885. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

It was there on the porch, as well as in the front room, that Grant received the flood of visitors who eagerly made the pilgrimage to gaze at the dying general. With the anticipatory clergyman John P. Newman in close attendance, there was a stream of Civil War generals, properly balanced Confederate to Union; of politicians, usually of respectably Republican stripe; and of vacationers from Saratoga Springs. The great man far outstripped any mountain scenery as the tourist attraction of the summer. “Every afternoon long lines” of these tourists “would walk past the cottage. Now and then Grant, sitting on the porch…writing or reading the newspapers, would look up and nod or wave his hand.” A self-appointed Grand Army of the Republic veteran hovered around, to prevent the curious from actually going up onto the porch to peer into the door when, by poor luck, the general was not outside. Not all the tourists were idly curious. There was much genuine affection and even reverence for the general. Simon Bolivar Buckner, the friend from Popocatepetl and enemy from Donelson, came to see him, and told reporters that his reunion with Grant was “too sacred” for him to discuss.²⁶

Grant’s need to be noticed, to be taken into account, had still not been sated. If he had sought seclusion in which to endure his pain and to complete his writing, it could have been found. Without question, the Fishes would have lent their place in Garrison, from which the public could easily have been barred; any number of Grant’s other rich friends had mountain and lake hideaways that he could have borrowed. Clearly, he did not want to be hidden away to die in obscurity.

In a century that relished the spectacle of dying there was, in America at least, no deathwatch the equal of Grant’s. Lincoln’s had been dramatic and immensely affecting, but it had also been tragically brief. With Grant, the nation for eight months read almost daily in the newspapers of the progress of the disease, of the devouring of the victim by the unmentioned cancer, and of the valiant battle of the old warrior, before getting the news of his final surrender—or victory—depending on the reader’s theology. When Grant’s disease became known back in the fall of 1884, the house on Sixty-sixth Street had become the object of pilgrims intent on the traditional watch over the death of the great. During the crisis in March, reporters hovered and crowds gathered. One enterprising newspaperman bragged of having seduced a servant across the street in order to be able to peer down from her attic room into the Grant ménage. But the people gathered on Sixty-sixth Street were as nothing compared to the thousands rallied by energetic newspaper writers across the country to the pastime of waiting for the great general to die. Not until General Eisenhower’s bowel movements gained public notice a century later were the American people given such graphic details about the health of a president.

Grant’s publisher was eager to capitalize on the magnificent market created by the focus on his dying. In June, the first volume of the book was in press, and the stenographers and typesetters worked around the clock rushing the last of the copy of the second volume into print. Their problem was not that Grant would die before his work was done, but that he would keep working after they thought he was finished. He insisted on going over the proofs, and made intricate, careful changes. More than he had ever wanted anything, he wanted the book to be right.

Despite the visitors, or perhaps stimulated by them, Grant kept writing. Samuel Clemens had the publishing company send a stenographer, N. E. Dawson, to the cottage, and Grant told Fred to concentrate on checking sources for changes and additions. Each day, wrapped in a blanket on the porch, or settled in a chair in the house, Grant with pencil and pad wrote his strong, quiet prose. His medicine was cocaine (counteracted at night with morphine to enable him to sleep), and it is legitimate to ask if some of the quick directness as well as the blandness of the later sections of the Memoirs is not traceable to the drugs. The non sequiturs that nonetheless flow together, in the odd short concluding chapter, suggest that the drugs had some effect. But whether their effect is discounted or credited, there is a strength to Grant’s narrative that argues against their being overvalued. He could sustain a story through two wars and eleven hundred pages. He had an extraordinary capacity to see certain of his life’s experiences with a forbidding wholeness, and could carry that wholeness efficiently to the printed page.

The Memoirs begins with a tantalizingly brief account of his ancestry, boyhood, West Point years, and courtship. Then comes the masterful and thorough chronicle of the Mexican War. This is followed by a meager summary of the bleak days of the 1850’s, with the rest—nearly two-thirds of the two volumes—devoted to a lucid account of the Civil War.²⁷

Writing his memoirs, June 27, 1885, Mount McGregor. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Grant’s story of the war does not have the flashes of fire of Sherman’s Memoirs, or the novelist’s details of Lew Wallace’s Autobiography. There is none of the lavish social detail—and irony—of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s great Civil War diary. Neither does Grant’s story have the narrative thrust and rich texture of the best present-day account of the war, Shelby Foote’s. But it is wonderfully clear. To read some of the tales of their battles written by other generals is mordantly amusing; they add more and more self-serving detail, only to end with a hopeless muddle. They create a metaphor for their own ineptitude, accomplishing exactly the opposite of what they set out to do. Grant avoided this. He apologised only for one hideously bloody day outside Vicksburg and for Cold Harbor, he bragged only in a most subtle and seemly fashion, and he left an indelible picture of himself as quietly competent. The book is, however, not merely an exercise in self-portrayal. Grant devoted excellent attention to theaters of the war in which he was not present (although Virginia, before he came east, is given short shrift). There is conciseness, totality, and strength, but what is perhaps most striking is the timeless quality of the prose. It has classical force.

Grant’s sentences are not Stein’s or Hemingway’s. Where the simplest of declarative sentences would seem exactly what you would expect Grant to write, he often added a clause. And repeatedly these clauses have a kind of throw-away quality. Life is finally more absurd, more complex, more intricate than will satisfy those looking for a simple Grant. There is no account of events after the Civil War; the eight years of his presidency are ignored. This omission could be attributed to the obvious fact that he had run out of time, but nothing in the structure of the book suggests that the postwar presidential events had ever been part of his conception of the work. He edited those disappointing years out of his story. Instead, he told of the years in which he was alive—the years of the two wars, with the first, in which he was a young participant who fought and watched others fight, as a prelude to the second, in which he was of enormous and undoubted importance.

The “Conclusion” is the strangest part of the book. Grant dictated these last thirteen pages using notes he had written on a lined pad. Here he passed a kind of summary judgment on his nation and its place in the world. Ideas scarcely connect, and despite occasional hedging, the comments are the most unguarded in the book. It begins, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.” With that “have to be,” Grant suggested that he almost begrudged the fact that his greatness stood on so ignoble a rock. He then devoted three paragraphs to slavery, concluding that it was a “degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge [it]….” The war was inevitable and, chillingly, he concluded that it was “probably well that we had the war when we did,” since otherwise the prewar particularism of the states would have hindered national growth and we would have been behind the Europeans in world commerce. This placement of America in a global context reflects his trip. In addition, he staked a major claim for the United States as a world power: “Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven themselves to be the most formidable in war of any nationality.” To this ominous assessment of the national character, he hastily added, “But this war was a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.”²⁸

He next chided European nations for their “lack of conscience” during the war, and then leaped to a relatively extended comment on his favorite foreign country, Mexico. Here he reiterated the principle of the Monroe Doctrine, without naming it. France was accorded the courtesy of being called “the traditional ally and friend of the United States,” but Louis Napoleon was likened to Jefferson Davis (though the Confederate leader was not named) and France to the South: “Like our own war between the States, the Franco-Prussian war was an expensive one; but it was worth to France all it cost her people,” because it “was the completion of the downfall of Napoleon III.” He then passed judgment on one military man to whom he had never found it flattering to be likened: “I never admired the character of the first Napoleon; but I recognize his great genius…. The third Napoleon could have no claim to having done a good or just act.”²⁹

He regretted the difficulties with England during the war, as “England and the United States are natural allies,” tied by blood. He saluted the people of Manchester for a “demonstration in favor of the North at the very time when their workmen were almost famishing.” The British Empire also got high marks: “England governs her own colonies, and particularly those embracing the people of different races from her own, better than any other nation.” And he pursued the theme of different races: “It is possible that the question of a conflict between races may come up in the future, as did that between freedom and slavery before.” In other—less bland—words, racial war was possible. Continuing, he wrote, “The condition of the colored man within our borders may become a source of anxiety, to say the least. But he was brought to our shores by compulsion, and he now should be considered as having as good a right to remain here as any other class of our citizens.” Then, in a non sequitur, he brought up his old idea of a black colony or state for America: “It was looking to a settlement of this question that led me to urge the annexation of Santo Domingo…. I took it that the colored people would go there in great numbers, so as to have independent states [of the Union] governed by their own race.”³⁰

Then Grant turned to his own race and his own torments: “After our rebellion, when so many young men were at liberty to return to their homes, they found they were not satisfied with the farm, the store, or the workshop of the villages, but wanted larger fields.” Those fields were, in this reverie, the American West, and here for the first time he gave the Mexican War his approval for having made so much of that territory free and clear for the United States: “It is probable that the Indians would have had control of these lands for a century yet but for the war. We must conclude, therefore, that wars are not always evils unmixed with some good.”³¹

With this compliment to war, he turned to a contemplation not only of the men who had fought with him but of other men he had encountered during his life, and presented a curious complex of conclusions about them. He was happy that people were no longer confined to their homes and caught in pockets of local idiom, but he was totally unsentimental about earlier free men in the West, the lonely and frequently alcoholic trappers. He saluted instead the single national idiom, the “commingling of the people,” good railroads, and the maps which were his metaphor for the careful charted order that had been brought to the nation—“…the country has filled up ‘from the centre all around to the sea.’” Speaking again of the Civil War, he concluded that it “made us a nation of great power and intelligence. We have but little to do to preserve peace, happiness and prosperity at home, and the respect of other nations.” And then, in one of his reversible sentences, he preached, “Our experience ought to teach us the necessity of the first; our power secures the latter.” This homily out of the way, he turned to his concluding paragraphs.³²

The great peroration ending “Let us have peace,” because of its nobility and its very generality, has been taken as lifting Ulysses S. Grant’s life above the private realm into a triumphant final resting place in the public sphere. But was that the message of his statement? Or was it, instead, his last sad attempt to escape his own personal past? R. C. Townsend has said of Sherwood Anderson, a writer who admired and perhaps even emulated Grant’s writing, “But always he is saying that without the courage to risk failure and without the courage to admit to it a boy cannot become a man.” Grant’s book is the opposite of an admission of failure; it tells only of a boyhood shadowed with the fear of being mocked as a failure and of an adulthood in which success in two wars ensured adulation. And so the boy did not become a man; he never owned up to all those painful failures that had occurred before the Civil War and recurred after it. He never told the other ordinary American men that it was all right to fail, to be gentle; that a horse did not have to be bargained for or used, but could be enjoyed. Those other Americans did not know of any way to escape the frustration of ugly daily competitions except by going to war, and Ulysses Grant did not either. He never found out how to escape the taunts of the big boys who had succeeded in politics or business. He had tried their games and done badly at them.³³

Then he wrote his book. The content of his homily at the end of the Memoirs is disappointing—the morphine did not help—but even in the worst of the tendentious passages there is a hint that he was still groping for a way to return the trust of the people who had fought alongside him and who, when the fighting was over, had called out to him, from crowds. “The war,” he wrote, “has made us a nation of great power and intelligence.” The simple authority of the statement disguises tragedy and folly; the power he spoke of is the worst legacy of Grant’s war, and one looks in vain for evidence from Grant-era politics of the use of much intelligence. But it is that word “intelligence” that arrests us. Intelligently, Grant has taught us to trust the quiet, direct language with which he told the story of his battles. His American plain speech seems right for a greater task. It is a language that argues against the seductions of power and for the acceptance of a common humanity. If we put aside the obvious disharmonies that Grant ignored, the full passage can be seen as an attempt to say to his fellow Americans, almost privately, what much of his life as a public man had denied.

I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to “Let us have peace.”

Americans were being told that to be kind was a good thing. Kindness was the homeliest of virtues; it had never been dishonored more than at Cold Harbor, but now, in 1885, it was almost as if he were saying that as we commonly face death, so perhaps we can commonly find kindness for other human transactions. His book gives us the quiet realistic words, and his life gives us the experiences, with which we can look at failure. He is one of the Americans who have given us a language for simple things, important things. We need it for the immense task of making common ground with men like those who understood him, and marched with him, and killed for him. And still seek some place for being a man and a man’s friend other than at war.³⁴

A splendid example of Grant’s ability to be true to a man he knew was displayed in June 1885, when he was reading proofs of the book. He had written an account of his first meeting with Secretary Stanton at Louisville in the fall of 1863. He and Julia had gone out to visit relatives when word of the worsening situation at Chattanooga reached Stanton and he sent aides scurrying through the city to find Grant. In his original draft, Grant wrote that once he had been found, he went back to the hotel and found Stanton “pacing the room rapidly in about the garb Mr. Davis was supposed to be wearing subsequently, when he was captured in a dressing gown.” In the proof he deleted the passage beginning “in about the garb Mr. Davis was supposed to be wearing” and inserted another in its place so that the printer would not have to reset the whole page. (It was reset.) He did not know whether the legend that Davis had worn women’s clothing as he tried to escape in April 1865 was true, and would not suggest that it was. Nor would he imply that Stanton was effeminate. This avoidance of a cheap anecdote is evidence of the honesty that is a fundamental strength in Grant’s book. Over the decades since its publication there have been many insinuations that Grant had a ghost writer. Clemens himself, if not Adam Badeau, has been mentioned in conjectures about the book’s authorship. The rumors are unfounded; Grant wrote it. The fundamental evidence lies in his style, unchanged from that of the simple orders he wrote in pencil during the war, but if further proof be needed, it can be found in the handwritten pages of the draft and in the careful marginal corrections in his steady, clear writing.³⁵

The book was now his life, but they took it away from him. On July 10, in one of the brave (and lucid) penciled notes with which he now “talked,” he told his doctor that Buck had brought up the first volume, finished, and that in two weeks “if they work hard they can have the second vol. copied ready to go to the printer. I will then feel that my work is done.” (His publishers were keeping up with him; the date July 18 is penciled on drawings of the maps which were to be included in the second volume, and on the margin of a map in which two critical battle areas are mislabeled, a note to the printer by an editor says, “Wilderness must go where Spottsylvania is and Spottsylvania where indicated. Please hurry. CLW & Co.”) Grant insisted on pressing ahead, reading the proofs of the second volume and making corrections on the stenographer’s longhand draft of the final chapter. Fred Grant faced a cruel dilemma. Conventional wisdom argued that he should see that his father was not overtaxed (although he might have asked what he was saving his father for), and he decided to put a stop to the restless work on the book. Knowing his father could not live much longer and wanting him to have the satisfaction of thinking he had completed his work, Fred sent back the last of the proofs and copy to the publisher. What the colonel did not understand was that Grant did not see it as finished. He wanted to go on working and to know that after his death work on the book would continue. To Fred he wrote:

If I should die here make arrangements for embalming my body and retaining it for buryal until pleasant weather in the fall. In that case you can continue your work and insure its being ready as fast as the printers can take it. This is my great interest in life, to see my work done. There is nothing in my condition that I know of except presentiment, on account of weakness to indicate that I may not as well live for the next three months as for the last five. Do not let the memory of me interfere with the progress of the book.³⁶

Too late, Dr. Shrady, who was more sensitive than either Dr. Douglas or the family to the living still being done by the dying man, recognized that to deprive Grant of his writing had been a mistake. When the patient rallied remarkably on July 12—he was even able to talk in an almost normal voice to Nellie that Sunday morning—Shrady recommended that he read The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, itself written by a doctor, and encouraged Fred to tell Grant that the relentless Century Magazine wanted still another article. The effort was gallant, but Grant recognized at last that he had no more work to do. He told Dr. Douglas, in another note, that he was pleased with the way he had written the section of the book on the Wilderness campaign and proud of the fifty pages he had added to the manuscript in a major revision—he had “done all of it over again from the crossing of the Rapidan…to Appomattox.” All this had evidently been accomplished at Mount McGregor. “There is nothing more I should do to it now,” he wrote on July 14, “and therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”³⁷

On the porch at Mount McGregor, July 19, 1885. Harrison Tyrrell is just inside the door. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Grant’s consciousness of his coming death had a magnificence not matched at any other time in his life. In a wonderfully heightened intensity, his notes to his doctor show flashes of intelligence that leap past even the impressive power of the best prose of the Memoirs. One day in July—the note is undated but clearly near the end—he wrote, “I do not sleep though I sometimes doze a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think 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.”³⁸

On July 19, one last time in top hat and dress suit and slippers, with his round owlish spectacles on, he crossed his legs and read the paper in a wicker chair just outside the front door. The picture that was taken was his last. His cane rested on the chair next to him; Tyrrell, his valet, darkly in the doorway, was not four feet away. On the twentieth, bored or frightened, with nothing more he could write, he asked to get out of the house and was trundled in a Bath chair along a poorly graded path to the eastern outlook. When he got there he was tired and out of sorts and wanted to come back as soon as Tyrrell was rested enough to push the wretched contraption. They took another route, encountered railroad tracks, and the general had to get out and climb over them. When they reached the cottage he was exhausted. The following day he was so drowsy that Douglas thought he would die. But he did not die. Not malnutrition, massive bleeding, or pneumonia would rob the inexorable cancer of its power to destroy. The doctors, consciously or subconsciously, were practicing euthanasia with their injections of brandy and morphine and applications of cocaine, but Grant held on. The Reverend Dr. Newman hovered. The family gathered; Buck was summoned from New York. At eleven-thirty Grant whispered to the doctor that he wanted them all, including the minister, to go to bed.

The next day, July 22, Dr. Shrady and Buck arrived by special train. All of the general’s children were now with him, and three of his grandchildren. So too was Julia. That evening a bed was brought down from the hotel, and Fred asked his father, who had not slept lying down in months, if he would give up his chairs and go to bed. The general finally surrendered and whispered that he would. His body was gaunt but his “beautiful hand,” small and strong, clutched the blanket. He lasted the night, and early in the morning the exhausted family left his bedside, but the morphine was doing its work. It accumulated in Grant’s brain and finally disabled the respiration and circulatory centers in the brain stem. At seven o’clock McQueeney, the nurse, ran for the doctor and for Tyrrell, who went up and hastily knocked on the bedroom doors. The family came downstairs. Julia had already come in to be with her husband. At 8:00 A.M. on July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died.³⁹

There would be more crowds. Curious sightseers would come to Mount McGregor to look at the body, and a phalanx of generals, comrades and foes together, would ride up Fifth Avenue at his funeral. A decade later, some of these old soldiers would come back in the rain to dedicate Grant’s Tomb, on a stretch above the Hudson River in New York City where he had probably never been. They said the weather was what kept the numbers down; still, some of his people did remember him, and they were there. But these were cheers that Grant would never hear. Now the silence was absolute.