ulysses s grant and us grant and selling of his memors and personal memoirs and mark twain and grant and twain

I am in the middle of reading Walter Friedman's instructive Birth of a Salesman, an exploration of the way that salesmanship changed in America from the mid-19th to early-20th centuries. A perfectly delightful chapter, though missing several important details, is entitled "Selling US Grant." Grant had the combined good and bad fortune to die to a painful throat cancer just about the time that the concept of the canvasser for subscription book sales was reaching its acme. Thus, though Grant had experienced a humiliating and devastating financial loss in 1884, the year before his death, he was able, by dint of determined labor on his memoirs until just a few days before his death, to provide handsomely for his widow, who lived on into the 20th century. These two essays are intended to probe suggestively many topics which would need to be more colorfully portrayed in order to have a full-orbed view of this period and the "selling" of US Grant.

A Word on Grant's Last Days

After leaving the White House in 1877 Grant obtained, with the help of many friends, the use of homes in New York City (66th Street), Long Branch, NJ and upstate New York, near Sarasota Springs. His popularity was still great, even though scandals tainted his second term. People liked his personableness, humility, decisiveness and even compassion. Ex-Presidents still didn't receive a pension in those days and, as he was forced to give up his military pension when he left the army to run for the Presidency in 1868, his financial situation was not particularly robust. He lent his name to a Wall Street Financial Firm (Grant & Ward) which went belly up in May 1884, thus angering investors small and great who had relied on Grant's name. He also lost nearly all his assets in the bankruptcy.

In order to try to repair the financial damage caused by the failure of his firm, he decided to write his memoirs. Mark Twain, whom he had met twice previously and who had just begun a publishing house in Hartford, Conn with his nephew Charles Webster, had been urging Grant to write these memoirs for a while. What I don't know is whether the contract Grant had with Century Company for the writing of four articles regarding his Civil War service was related to writing his memoirs, nor how many of those articles he actually ended up writing. In any case, by the summer of 1884, he had decided to work on his memoirs. Yet before he did so, he began to write a series of articles on four decisive battles in the Civil War (beginning with Shiloh and Vicksburg) for the Century magazine. He actually didn't begin the hard work on his memoirs until October or November 1884.

The Personal Memoirs

It was while he was at his Long Branch, NJ home in early June 1884 (June 2) that he ate a peach and experienced a most "searing pain" in the back of his throat. He didn't receive medical attention for the pain until he had returned to NYC late in the summer, at which time he discovered he had inoperable throat cancer (he discovered this late in October). For most of the rest of his life (he died on July 23, 1885), he could not sleep lying down because of the pain in his throat, but had to sleep fitfully in a chair. Often he would work on his memoirs for 20 hours a day as a way of dealing with the excruciating pain as the cancer slowly spread to his tongue and jaw.

In one point that Friedman doesn't make clear, at least with respect to the chronology of it, Grant ended up deciding not to sign the memoir contract with Century and went with Twain's new firm instead. Twain promised that Grant would get 70% of the profits of the book, while Century had promised him a much more meager fare (10%). I don't know exactly when the contract with Twain's firm was signed (it was in Februaury 1885--2/4/06) or how far along negotiations with Century had gone when he went over to Twain's firm (pretty far; Grant thought he had a "moral obligation" to go with Century. Twain had to dissuade him from this). Thus, Grant worked in earnest on his memoirs for only about eight months. He employed his son, Frederick, and Adam Badeau, a former military aide, to act as his "fact checkers" as he either dictated or wrote his work. One other fact that isn't clear is whether his voice gave out late in the process, requiring him to write all the words after a certain date, or whether his voice was useful to him for most of the writing of the book. One reference I ran across says that on his most productive day he dictated 10,000 words (which would be about 30-35 typed pages).

Grant worked almost without interruption in the second floor room at the head of the stairs at the 66th St. address as rumors of his declining health spread throughout NYC. Indeed, beginning in the Winter of 1885 an informal "death watch" began, with dozens, and then hundreds of people gathering outside of his Manhattan home to catch the latest news on the former President's condition. Near the middle of June 1885, his doctors urged transporting Grant to the home near Saratoga Springs (Mt. McGregor) in the hope that the fresh rural air would ease his pain and retard the growth of the cancer. Grant continued working on the manuscript, this time editing as well as writing, until nearly his dying day. Again, the accounts I read differ on this. One account has Grant working on his memoirs until the first week of July, while another has him "finish" his work on July 19, just four days before his death. There can be no question that the rush to complete the memoirs was the consuming task of his final days.

Conclusion

Perhaps we should pause on that point before moving to the actual "selling" of Grant's Personal Memoirs. There can be no more sympathetic picture of an accomplished person than one that shows the person, up until the dying day, engaged in the writing task. Rather than sinking into despair, being consumed by the pain of the cancer, weeping at his fortune or becoming bitter at his loss, Grant continued working, with whatever equanimity he could muster, until the very end. And, astonishingly, the Personal Memoirs are considered to be one of the most eloquent Presidential memoirs we have. Indeed, Mark Twain himself said, with perhaps some exaggeration, that they were the most eloquent and powerful memoirs of a military commander since Julius Caesar.

But let's move now to the selling of US Grant's story.

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