Grant Dies After Finishing Memoirs: A Final Victory

He finished the last sentence four days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 1884, was nearly bankrupt from a financial fraud perpetrated by his business partner Ferdinand Ward, and raced against the disease to finish his memoirs and save his family from poverty. He had been the commanding general who won the Civil War for the Union, accepting Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865, and then served two terms as president. But the presidency had been marred by corruption scandals among his appointees, and Grant's trusting nature left him vulnerable to the swindlers who wiped out his savings in 1884. Mark Twain visited Grant, read the early chapters of the memoir, and offered to publish them through his own company on far better terms than the publisher Century Magazine had proposed. Grant wrote through the winter and spring of 1885, often producing ten thousand words a day despite pain so severe he could barely swallow. He dictated when he could no longer hold a pen. He completed the manuscript on July 16, 1885, and died on July 23 at Mount McGregor, New York. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant sold 300,000 copies in the first years and earned his wife Julia over $450,000. Twain considered them the finest military memoirs ever written in English, a judgment that most historians have since confirmed. Grant wrote with the same clarity and directness that had characterized his military orders, producing a work of literature from the jaws of death and bankruptcy.