Ulysses S. Grant

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.