Ulysses S. Grant

Summary

Ulysses S. Grant rose from obscurity to become the general who won the American Civil War and then a two-term President of the United States. Yet he had little money sense, and after leaving the White House in 1877 he was not wealthy. In 1880 he tied his name and savings to a Wall Street brokerage, Grant & Ward, founded by his son Buck and a young financier named Ferdinand Ward, who was hailed as the Young Napoleon of Finance.

Ward's operation was a fraud, an early Ponzi scheme. When it collapsed in May 1884, it took Grant's entire fortune with it. The former President, who had borrowed $150,000 from William H. Vanderbilt to try to save the firm, was left essentially penniless, his honor stained by association with a swindle he had not understood. Soon afterward he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat.

With death approaching and his family facing destitution, Grant did the one thing he could do: he wrote. Encouraged and ultimately published by his friend Mark Twain, whose firm offered far better terms than the publisher Grant first approached, he raced to complete his Personal Memoirs while the disease consumed him.

He finished the manuscript in July 1885 and died days later, on July 23. The memoirs were a critical and commercial triumph, earning his widow, Julia, royalties of roughly $450,000, an immense sum that secured the family's future. The book is regarded as one of the finest military memoirs ever written, and Grant won his last and most personal victory from his deathbed.

Timeline

The First Fortune

Ulysses S. Grant's first great success was not financial but military and political. After a failed early career and years of obscurity, he rose during the Civil War to command all Union armies, accepting the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in April 1865 and emerging as the North's foremost hero. In 1868 he was elected President, and he served two terms from 1869 to 1877.

Grant's presidency was marked by his support for Reconstruction and Black civil rights, including enforcement against the Ku Klux Klan, but it was also marred by financial scandals among his appointees, even as Grant himself was not personally corrupt. After leaving office in 1877 he embarked on a celebrated two-and-a-half-year world tour, greeted as a statesman on several continents.

What Grant never possessed was a head for money or wealth to match his fame. He left the White House without a fortune and with no pension, since former Presidents received none at the time. Seeking financial security in his later years, he looked to Wall Street, lending his prestige and his savings to a venture that promised to make him rich at last.

The Fall

In 1880 Grant invested in a new brokerage and investment house, Grant & Ward, in which his son Ulysses Buck Grant Jr. was a partner alongside Ferdinand Ward, a charismatic young financier celebrated as the Young Napoleon of Finance. The firm appeared to generate spectacular returns, and the former President put much of his money into it and lent it the weight of his name, drawing in other investors who trusted Grant.

The returns were an illusion. Ward was running what amounted to a Ponzi scheme, paying old investors with the money of new ones and rehypothecating securities, all while the firm produced no real profits. In early May 1884 the scheme unraveled. Desperate to save it, Grant appealed to the railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt, who lent him $150,000 personally, but the money vanished into the collapse.

Grant & Ward failed on May 6, 1884, helping to set off a financial panic. Ward fled and was later imprisoned for fraud. Grant was wiped out, left with only a few hundred dollars in cash and his honor compromised by his association with the swindle. To repay Vanderbilt he surrendered his swords, war trophies, and personal mementos. That same year he learned he had cancer of the throat, almost certainly the result of a lifetime of cigars.

The Comeback

Facing terminal illness and the prospect of leaving his wife, Julia, with nothing, Grant turned to writing for money. He began producing articles on his Civil War campaigns for The Century Magazine, which were well received and revealed an unexpected gift for clear, vivid prose. The Century company then offered to publish a full memoir on standard royalty terms.

Mark Twain, Grant's friend, intervened. He argued that Grant was being underpaid and persuaded him to sign instead with Twain's own publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, which offered Grant a far more generous deal, reportedly 70 percent of the book's net profits. Twain also devised an aggressive subscription-sales campaign, sending thousands of canvassers, many of them Union veterans, door to door across the country.

Grant wrote against the clock. As the cancer spread and robbed him of his voice, he worked through pain, sometimes dictating, sometimes writing in longhand, determined to finish before he died. He completed the two-volume Personal Memoirs in mid-July 1885 and died on July 23, just days later, at Mount McGregor, New York. The book was a sensation. It sold hundreds of thousands of sets and earned Julia Grant royalties of roughly $450,000, with a first check reported at around $200,000, securing the family's financial future and accomplishing exactly what Grant had set out to do.

The Turnaround

Legacy

Ulysses S. Grant's final act redeemed both his finances and his name. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant rescued his family from the ruin Ferdinand Ward had inflicted, and they have never gone out of print. The book is widely regarded as a classic of military literature and one of the greatest memoirs in American letters, admired for its candor, modesty, and clarity.

The broader meaning of the episode is the inversion of Grant's reputation. A man who had been mocked as a naive mark, swindled in his old age and dead of cancer in genteel poverty, instead left a literary monument that has outlasted the scandal entirely. Where his presidency had been clouded by the corruption of others, his memoirs stood as a work of unimpeachable personal integrity.

Grant was buried in New York City, where his tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America, was completed in 1897. His widow, Julia, lived in security on the proceeds of the book he had killed himself to finish. The Grant & Ward fraud is remembered today as one of the first great Ponzi schemes in American history; the memoirs it provoked are remembered as a masterpiece.

Lessons

References

• Ulysses S. Grant Wikipedia
• Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant Wikipedia
• The Failure of Grant & Ward: A Cautionary Tale U.S. National Park Service
• How Mark Twain Helped Ulysses S. Grant Write His Personal Memoirs U.S. National Park Service