Ulysses S. Grant, the brilliant Union general and former two-term President, was close to flat broke. As he returned home on the evening of May 6, 1884, he had $80 in his pocket. When he arrived at his home on 3 East 66th Street in Manhattan, he was able to scrounge another $130 from his wife Julia and from around the house. This was it. Their bank accounts had been seized that day. In an instant, his entire financial net worth was completely gone.
Fifteen months later, Ulysses Simpson Grant would be dead. However, before his death, Grant would embark upon an improbable journey of courage, resilience, and friendship—that closely involved Mark Twain, and culminated in one of the most incredible sales campaigns of the 19th century.
Grant’s years post-Presidency
In 1877, at the close of his scandal-marred second term, Grant was adrift. Without a career or ancestral home to return to, Ulysses and Julia took a 2-year trip around the world. Greeted by crowds and dignitaries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, Grant was accorded treatment usually reserved for kings and emperors. This treatment reflected the unprecedented respect that the U.S. had recently acquired throughout the world. As Grant hobnobbed with the world’s leaders and potentates, many of them consulted him on the various issues they faced at home.
When Grant finally returned to the States in 1879, a large contingent of the Republican party was eager to nominate him to a third term as President. Yet, as he considered his options, Grant was also presented with another opportunity that would set the stage for the final dramatic chapter in his life.
Wall Street beckons
Ulysses S. Grant’s history in business was not good. As an unhappy example, in 1855, having failed at farming he was reduced to selling firewood on the street corners of St. Louis in order to buy Christmas presents for his family. Yet here in 1881, out of office and without a steady income or a Presidential pension (Truman was the first to receive one), Grant was extremely conscious of the need to take care of his family.
The beginning of Wall Street’s courtship with Grant came in the form of J. Pierpont Morgan. Grateful for Grant’s contributions to the nation, Morgan and others organized a trust fund of $250,000 on the general’s behalf, as well as purchasing a brownstone for the Grants, on 66th Street, just off of Fifth Avenue.
Soon, Grant was approached with a business prospect brought to him by his youngest son, Ulysses (Buck) Grant, Jr. 1881 was a heady time on Wall Street. It was in the midst of the Gilded Age, where enterprising capitalists and entrepreneurs were amassing golden fortunes in mining, railroads, banking, and industry. Buck Grant was in the middle of this fast-money vortex. After attending Exeter and Harvard, as well as earning a law degree from Columbia, Buck had married well. Buck’s wife was the daughter of Jerome B. Chaffee, a Coloradan who had made millions from his investments in Colorado’s silver mines, and had parlayed his mining wealth into one of Colorado’s U.S. Senate seats.
Buck Grant had recently made the acquaintance of Ferdinand Ward, one of the rising stars of Wall Street and known by the sobriquet, the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” Ward proposed to Buck Grant that they enter a partnership together, and the investment firm of Grant & Ward opened an office on 2 Wall Street.
Ulysses Grant agreed to join the partnership, and Grant & Ward was capitalized with funds from Ward, Buck Grant, and the ex-President. Each contributed $100,000. (Equal to $2.2 million in 2016 dollars.) Between 1881 and 1884, the money flowed in. Although the former President was a silent partner, his prestige and reputation was an essential element of the firm’s success. For much of the money that came the firm’s way, including the pensions of hundreds of appreciative veterans of the Union army, there was an assumption that General Grant played an active role in Grant & Ward.
By 1884, the firms’ capitalization had risen to $15 million. ($350+ million in 2016 dollars.) For Ulysses S. Grant, this apparent success was a welcome relief.
A scam revealed
In May of 1884, Grant’s reverie abruptly stopped. In reality, Ferdinand Ward was a crook and financial fraud. Unbeknownst to General Grant, Grant & Ward was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. (Although, Ferdinand Ward’s fraud actually preceded that of Charles Ponzi by almost 40 years.)
While the Grants had naively entrusted all of the investment operations to Ward, the firm’s cash in-flows never made it to legitimate investments. Rather, Ward lavished the money on himself. buying a townhouse in Manhattan, retaining a French cook, and purchasing a grand estate in Stamford, Connecticut complete with stables of horses.
A few historians have speculated on Grant’s culpability and awareness of Ward’s financial deceits. Yet to many, Grant’s heedlessness was consistent with his pattern of trusting others with a naive loyalty, a characteristic that had doomed his Presidency 10 years earlier. The other backdrop to Grant’s credulous acceptance of Ward was that this was the Gilded Age, and Grant had known many men on Wall Street who had become as rich as Croesus in short order. Consequently, Ward’s apparent ability to award the early investors in Grant & Ward “dividends” of 40% did not set off alarm bells. To Grant, the firm’s success was a sign that his lifetime of financial worry had ended.
The stark reality was that Grant & Ward’s collapse bankrupted the Grants. Ulysses and Julia, along with their son and many of their old friends and family, had lost everything. Ward had been commingling the firm’s accounts with his own, dummied bookkeeping entries, and deposited loan proceeds into his own private account. When the dust was settled, it was revealed that the liabilities of Grant & Ward exceeded $16 million. The firm’s assets totaled $57,000.
Yet, Grant’s final dramatic chapter was just beginning. In his remaining months, he would demonstrate a courageous and dogged resolve that would cement his legacy as one of the country’s greatest 19th century heroes.
Cancer!
The collapse of Grant & Ward hastened a larger ripple effect that became known as The Panic of 1884. When the financial alarm spread, Grant’s sole remaining source of funds, the $250,000 trust fund established by J.P. Morgan, went bust too. The trust had invested primarily in the bonds of the Wabash Railroad, which had defaulted.
As news of Grant’s plight became more widely known, citizens revealed their largesse in remarkable ways. William Vanderbilt, the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt and great-grandfather of Gloria Vanderbilt (and great-great-grandfather of Anderson Cooper) offered to cover a portion of Grant’s debt. Grant refused. A complete stranger sent Grant $500 with a note, “General, I owe you this for Appomattox.”
A tragic turn of events occurred for the ex-President in November, 1884. While eating a peach, Grant felt a stabbing pain in his throat. A visit to his physician confirmed the worst. Grant had cancer—no doubt a by-product of his egregious smoking habit, which amounted to as many as 24 cigars a day.
Broke, dying of cancer, and lacking any obvious resources to care for his wife and family, Ulysses S. Grant was at the bleakest point in his storied life.
Enter Mark Twain
Mark Twain was thirteen years younger than Ulysses Grant. He considered Grant a national hero, savior of the Union, and stingily treated by the nation as a whole. Twain was at a critical juncture in his own professional life. He had just published Huckleberry Finn, and it had not been well-received. Libraries throughout the country had banned the book as being “trash and suitable only for the slums.” Twain had also recently formed his own publishing company, C.L. Webster & Company, and had placed his nephew-in-law in charge.
Eager to help the former President, whom he revered, Twain saw an opportunity to do a good deed and enrich himself at the same time. In 1884, Twain had learned that Grant was considering writing his personal memoirs and had verbally agreed to publish with Century Publishing Company. Twain visited Grant in New York in an effort to wrest Grant from the rival publisher, but Grant, true to form, was steadfast in his loyalty to Century.
In a feat of salesmanship, Twain pointed out to Grant that it was he (Twain) who had originally suggested that Grant begin writing his personal history. (Twain and Grant had met several times, and in 1879, the author was the featured speaker at a fabled 6-hour dinner honoring General Grant at the Palmer House in Chicago)
Twain also promised Grant an unprecedented share of the profits: 70%. This was an arrangement too good to pass up, and Grant finally agreed to work with him.
The general begins to write
As the general began his memoirs, he was convinced that it was his final chance to settle his debts and provide for Julia and his family. Remarkably, Grant was not at all confident about his writing skills. Up to that point, his experience as a writer had been limited to hastily written letters and memos that he dashed off on the battlefield and in the White House. Yet Twain believed that Grant’s writing style was one of his greatest strengths. Unlike much of the florid prose of the day, Grant’s dispatches were models of brevity, clarity, simplicity, and honesty. Twain was convinced that Grant could produce a major bestseller.
In the fall of 1884, Grant sat down to write. The Grants’ house, on 66th Street, one door down from Fifth Avenue and in view of Central Park, was beautifully placed. Each day, Grant retired to a large square table in the front room on the second floor. Although the pain and the doctors often interrupted him, as did the swirl of children and grandchildren, Grant was steadfast in his attention to his work. Determined to compose every word for himself, Grant would spend as many as eight hours daily, writing, and dictating his memoirs.
With a steely determination, he finished the first of the two volumes by mid-May. Twain often spent long hours in the New York apartment, and shared proofreading duties with Fred Grant, the general’s son. Twain’s greatest worry was that Grant would not live to finish his work. In March, Twain had written to his English publisher, “He is failing steadily and the disease is incurable.”
As the cancer grew, Grant’s health rapidly declined. Eating became intolerable, and Grant was often wracked with fits of coughing and vomiting blood. From a stout 200 lbs., Grant withered away to a gaunt 150 lbs. by the spring of 1885.
To keep him going and alleviate the pain, the general’s doctors administered the accepted drugs of the day: cocaine and morphine. In the morning, his physicians would apply a tincture of cocaine to the plum-sized ulceration in his throat. When night arose, they would medicate him with an injection of morphine to induce sleep. (In the 1880’s, morphine and cocaine were cheaply available. Cocaine, for example, was used to treat the common cold. Both drugs could be purchased at the corner apothecary!)
A national death vigil
In June of 1885, as the oppressive heat of the New York summer encroached, the Grants decided to escape. They had been offered the use of a summer cottage at Mount McGregor, a few miles from Saratoga Springs, New York. As they traveled upstate in the splendor of William Vanderbilt’s private railroad car, throngs of adoring citizens lined the route. This was partly the result of the national deathwatch that had been happening over the past eight months. The public had become acutely aware of the general’s condition, and the press had followed his every move with breathless headlines such as, “Gen. Grant Much Worse.”
Grant raced to complete his life’s work. Each day he would sit on the porch at Mount McGregor, making his final revisions. Union Army veterans, thousands of them, came just to get a glimpse of the general sitting on the porch, pen in hand, writing away. They solemnly filed past, sometimes in quasi-military formation. Grant, clad in a silk top hat, dress coat, and scarf around the neck, acknowledged them with a nod of the head or a wave of the hand.
Among Grant’s visitors in his final days was Simon Bolivar Buckner, a Confederate general who had surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson in 1862. At this stage, Grant was unable to speak, but he wrote a note to Buckner that said, “I have witnessed since my illness just what I have wished since the war, harmony and good will between the sections.”
Grant finished his memoirs on July 18, 1885. Five days later, on July 23, Grant passed away at 8:08 a.m. Surrounded by his family, Julia, his four children, three doctors, and his African-American valet, Harrison Tyrell, Grant opened his eyes for a moment, gasped, and then his grip on Julia’s hand went slack. His son, Fred, leaned over and touched his father’s forehead for the last time.
Laid to rest
Within moments of his death, bells around the nation tolled 63 times, once for each year of Grant’s life. Grant’s funeral procession was the largest that New York City (and the nation) had ever seen. Twenty-four black horses drew Grant’s catafalque through the city. The column of mourners that accompanied Grant was seven miles long, including three U.S. Presidents. The procession took over five hours to pass, and was witnessed by more than one million people. Grant’s pallbearers included Union generals who fought with him, Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman; and Confederate generals who fought against him, Simon Bolivar Buckner and Joseph E. Johnston. Grant was buried in a plain dark suit. He had given up his uniforms to pay his debts.
The sales campaign to sell Grant’s memoirs
From the windows of C.L. Webster & Company’s Union Square office, Mark Twain witnessed the funeral procession as it slowly advanced up Broadway. Simultaneously, Webster’s printing presses were pumping out hundreds of copies of Grant’s two-volume Personal Memoirs. By late October 1885, 320,000 sets had been printed.
Twain had painstakingly prepared for the final leg of Grant’s astonishing journey, which also became the largest and most successful sales campaign of the 19th century. In a massive gamble, Twain had committed all of his available cash, including everything he earned lecturing plus an additional $100,000 that he had borrowed—all to finance the production costs of Grant’s book.
In those days, most books were sold door-to-door, not in bookstores. According to the U.S. census, in 1880 there were 50,000 book agents who traipsed across the countryside far-and-wide, taking orders for delivery of books at a later date. This is how Twain sold virtually all of his books. “Subscription selling,” as it was known, could be especially lucrative for the author. In Twain’s case, he could earn as much as 50% of the profits on some of his books.
While Grant wrote his final chapters, Twain and Webster began to assemble their army of book agents, who would set about the nation selling Grant’s book. Twain instructed Webster to pay special attention to hiring Union veterans, who would be harder for citizens to turn away, given the subject matter of the book. By the spring of 1885, Webster & Company had hired 10,000 salesmen—and women—to comb the countryside.
Book agents working for Webster & Company also carried a 37-page manual, “How to Introduce the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant”, which outlined a series of sales arguments, which Mark Twain is presumed to have contributed.
All of Twain’s book agents were instructed to begin their pitch with these exact words, “I called to give you an opportunity to see General Grant’s book, of which so much has been said in the papers.” Other sales nuggets include:
- “Get the prospect seated, in a fence corner, behind a stump, on the plow beam. Put the book right in his lap, but YOU turn the pages.”
- “One of the strongest arguments that can be used to get a man’s order is by telling him of his influence, and other means of flattery, or rather compliments, which should always be used in such quantities as will take well, and to be successfully done must thoroughly inform yourself about the man before calling on him.”
- “In leaving a house be careful not to turn your back to the family; retire sideways, keeping your eye on the good people, and let your last glance be full of sunshine.”
Epilogue
Grant’s Personal Memoirs was an unbounded success, both from a literary and commercial standpoint. Twain, no objective observer, considered it a masterpiece. Gertrude Stein admired the book greatly, saying she could not think of Grant without weeping. General Norman Schwarzkopf called this the finest memoir of war experiences that has ever been penned.
From a business standpoint, Grant’s autobiography accomplished everything that he had hoped for and more. It became the #2 best-selling book in American history (#1: the Bible). When the sales campaign was complete, Twain was able to forward Julia Grant royalties totaling $450,000 ($10.7 million in 2016 dollars) from the sale of her late husband’s book.
There’s a line from Grant’s memoirs that encapsulates one of his greatest strengths: “One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or do anything, not to have to turn back until the thing intended was accomplished.” For Ulysses S. Grant, this thinking guided him forward throughout his life, whether he was conquering Vicksburg, or racing against cancer over the last 443 days of his life to finish an extraordinary book and provide a legacy for his beloved wife.