Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Twain admired the even-tempered humility of the withered general. As world luminaries inundated him with telegrams, Twain was struck by his “perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention.”74 He pondered Grant’s kindness and “aggravatingly trustful nature” and couldn’t fathom how the man who had negotiated tough terms at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg was such a ready mark for Ferdinand Ward.75 Grant was still ashamed of having been fooled by Ward’s blatant deception, but refused to submit to vengeance. Twain, by contrast, said he himself was “inwardly boiling all the time. I was scalping Ward, flaying him alive, breaking him on the wheel, pounding him to jelly, and cursing him with all the profanity known to the one language I am acquainted with.”76

  Grant was fated to have one final disappointment in a trusted figure. Ever since joining Grant’s staff in 1864, Adam Badeau had relied on Grant for advancement at every turn. Thanks to Grant he had retired from the army as a brevet brigadier general, worked in the White House, and served as U.S. consul in London. The bearded, bespectacled Badeau fancied himself a literary man, becoming Grant’s authorized wordsmith, and lectured on his military campaigns. His career was shadowed by drinking allegations. When he shared a Washington boardinghouse with Henry Adams, the latter said he “resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement.”77 Grant retained him as London consul even after Hamilton Fish reported that Badeau had engaged in extended drinking bouts, some lasting for days. One Grant intimate remembered Badeau “in the vicinity of the White House, so drunk, that he walked in a circle two or three time[s] round before he straightened out.”78 It was yet another case of Grant loving not wisely but too well.

  Grant had spelled out clearly the terms upon which Badeau would assist him with his memoirs. Knowing his memoirs would compete with Badeau’s history, he promised to pay him $5,000 from the first $20,000 in royalties and $5,000 from the next $10,000. Badeau seemed content with the arrangement. But, like many sycophants, Badeau nursed secret resentments of the man upon whom he had relied, hidden grievances that boiled over in April as work on the memoirs dragged on longer than expected and Grant’s illness made working conditions arduous. Grant would give pages to Badeau, who corrected spelling and grammar or assisted with the narrative flow—standard copyediting tasks. Although Badeau helped to polish the book and knit together random passages, the essential content and style came from Grant and were fully consistent with his earlier writings. Badeau, however, feared history would honor the wrong man, the inferior writer and historian U. S. Grant, and his version of events found its way into print on April 29 when the New York World ran a gossipy item denying that Grant could possibly author his own reminiscences. “The work upon his new book, about which so much has been said, is the work of Gen. Adam Badeau,” it declared.79 Mark Twain erupted in fury, branding the World “that daily issue of unmedicated closet paper.” Instead of settling for an apology or a retraction, he implored Grant to bring a lawsuit whose punitive damages would “cripple—yes, disable—that paper financially.”80 When no other papers dignified the charge, Twain relented and advised against legal action.

  On May 2, Badeau composed an insulting letter to Grant that protested the arrangement under which he worked. He didn’t bother to mask his rage or show respect for his longtime patron. Because Grant now had to dictate his memoir, Badeau claimed his job would be to “connect the disjointed fragments into a connected narrative. This work is the merest literary drudgery—such as I would never consent to do for any one but you . . . I desire the fame of my own book, not of yours. Yours is not, and will not be, the work of a literary man, but the simple story of a man of affairs and of a great general; proper for you, but not such as would add to my credit at all.”81 Incensed that Grant’s book would “supplant and stamp out mine,” he demanded payment of $1,000 monthly in advance and, more shockingly, 10 percent of all profits from Grant’s book.82 A pallid Badeau melodramatically handed Grant the letter that morning, after which Fred found his father pacing moodily. Grant had always taken pride in his writing style and was deeply wounded by Badeau’s letter. Removing it from a drawer, he gave it to Fred. “Read this & tell me what you think of it,” he said.83 According to Julia, the Badeau letter represented “the most cruel blow” her husband had ever received.84

  During the next few days, a weakened Grant wrote an impassioned reply that covered eleven foolscap pages and is unique in his annals. Seldom, if ever, did he deliver such blunt, unsparing criticism. He started out by saying that he and Badeau must now part, since he could find many people to perform the task of editing who would find it neither drudgery nor degrading. Then came a devastating critique of Badeau that showed Grant’s powers of psychological penetration: “You are petulant, your anger is easily aroused and you are overbearing even to me at times, and always with those for whom you have done or are doing, literary work.”85 He reviewed Badeau’s history of quarrels with publishers and politicians and how he grew enraged if his advice went unheeded. Grant blamed the poor sales of Badeau’s Military History on his interminable delays and long-winded style. Then turning to Badeau’s charge that he needed help writing his book, Grant offered a stirring defense of his own style:

  I have only to say that for the last twenty-four years I have been very much employed in writing. As a soldier I wrote my own orders, directions and reports. They were not edited nor assistance rendered. As President I wrote every official document, I believe, bearing my name . . . All these have been published and widely circulated. The public has become accustomed to them and [know] my style of writing. They know that it is not even an attempt to imitate either a literary [or classical style] and that it is just what it is pure and simple and nothing else.86

  Badeau’s reply was bitterly ungracious: “You look upon my assistance as that of an ordinary clerk or literary hack; I thought I was aiding you as no one else could in doing a great work.”87 He promised to remove his belongings from East Sixty-Sixth Street and secure new lodgings. The feud left Badeau in an awkward position: he had been excommunicated by the dying Grant even as he traded on his intimacy with him. In a letter published years later, Badeau pretended that Grant hadn’t been in his right mind when he wrote the angry dismissal: “This letter . . . could never have received Gen. Grant’s sanction had he been well in body and mind; drugged, diseased, and under the influence of his son, he put his name to a paper unworthy of his fame, full of petty spite and vulgar malice, such as he never displayed, and worse yet, of positive and palpable falsehood.”88

  Grant was not through cutting Badeau down to proper size. Two months later, he sent him a taunting letter, saying Fred had been forced to redo Badeau’s work on the memoirs, having found too many errors. “To be frank with you you are helpless, and filled with a false pride . . . You, a literary man, cannot sharpen a lead pencil, open a box or pack up your books.” He let Badeau know he had long overlooked his drinking history. “On one occasion you were sent from London to Madrid with very important dispatches, got overcome with liquor and switched off by the wayside and did not turn up in Madrid for some days after you should have been there . . . your nature is not of that unselfish kind I had supposed.”89

  Luckily, Grant was surrounded by loving family members who didn’t disappoint him. Nellie came from England and moved into the house. Grant grew even more doting with his children. He had always inspired loyalty in people who worked for him, especially his butler and valet—and more recently nurse—Harrison Terrell, who was born into slavery and had been with him for four years. While some family members seemed to dislike Terrell, Grant always defended him and refused to allow him to be mistreated. Twain remembered Grant’s referring to the discrimination visited upon Terrell as a black man by saying, “We are responsible for these things in his face—it is not fair to visit our fault upon them—let him alone.”90

  In his final months, Grant showed exceptional kindness to Terrell, furnishing him with a glowing recommendation le
tter for use after his death so he could find employment as a War Department messenger. Terrell’s son Robert had just graduated cum laude from Harvard. While he was there, Grant had provided him with a beautiful letter to obtain summer work in the Boston Custom House: “My special interest in him is from the fact that his father—a most estimable man—is my butler, beside I should feel an interest in any young man, white or colored, who had the courage and ability to graduate himself at Harvard without other pecuniary aid than what he could earn.”91 Robert Terrell was to befriend Booker T. Washington and become the first black municipal judge in Washington.

  Harrison Terrell had unusual opportunities to observe Grant’s drinking habits. Like earlier commentators, he acknowledged that even “a couple of small swallows” caused Grant to slur his speech and noted that he invariably abstained from alcohol at stressful moments.92 “It is not true that Gen. Grant was a whiskey guzzler,” he insisted. “Like many another man, he liked an occasional nip very well, but, after all, he was no more than a moderate drinker.”93 Andrew Carnegie, who had dined frequently with Grant in New York, recalled how he would turn his wineglass upside down at dinners: “That indomitable will of his enabled him to remain steadfast to his resolve, a rare case as far as my experience goes.”94 All available evidence suggests Grant had abstained from alcohol and largely vanquished the problem through sheer willpower and perseverance—his stock in trade—and the protective vigilance of his loving wife. It was one of the supreme triumphs of a life loaded with major accomplishments.

  Mark Twain had struggled with similar cravings for alcohol and tobacco. When they discussed the subject, Grant mentioned that although doctors had urged him to sip whiskey or champagne, he could no longer abide the taste of liquor. Twain pondered this statement long and hard. “Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense?” he wondered. “Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others & likewise himself that he hadn’t ever even had any taste for it.”95 Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors’ behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. “I could understand that feeling,” Twain later proclaimed. “He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk.”96 Although Twain hated puritanical killjoys who robbed life of its small pleasurable vices, he respected abstinence based on an absence of desire.

  Nothing riled Twain more than assertions that he had secretly ghostwritten Grant’s memoirs—a canard that has echoed down the years. Twain was the first to admit that Grant’s lean, ironic prose was unique and paid homage to Grant’s “flawless” style.97 He could no more imitate Grant than vice versa. A close inspection of Grant’s manuscript in the Library of Congress shows the writing in his own hand, starting with the clear, flowing penmanship of the early months down to the cramped, slanted fragments of the later period when pain and narcotics fogged his mind. Some final sections appear to be in the handwriting of Noble E. Dawson or Fred Grant, but never of Twain.

  With Badeau gone, Grant experienced a remarkable burst of productivity and wrote with keen relish. As in wartime, he was at his best when death lurked around the corner. Alone in his library, he subordinated everything to writing, and newspapers meticulously chronicled his literary progress. “So absorbed did he become in the business at hand,” one paper reported, “that he voluntarily gave up his noonday drive and afternoon walk.”98 Amid this astonishing output, Twain was nonplussed to learn from Fred that his father needed an encouraging editorial word: “I was as much surprised as Columbus’s cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.”99 Grant was overjoyed when Twain told him his memoirs would stand alongside Caesar’s Commentaries for purity, simplicity, and fairness and qualify as “the best purely narrative literature in the language.”100 On May 23, Grant realized he had to pen a dedication for his narrative. “These volumes are dedicated to the American soldier and sailor,” he wrote simply.101 When Fred questioned whether the dedication alluded only to those who had fought for the North, he replied that it was for “those we fought against as well as those we fought with. It may serve a purpose in restoring harmony.”102

  On April 27, when Grant celebrated his sixty-third birthday, Andrew Carnegie rushed over sixty-three roses and Julia illuminated the dinner table with sixty-three candles. Grant calmly faced the prospect of his own death and refused to skirt the issue. In mid-May, he dictated a message for a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that had a touching, patriarchal tone: “Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again, nor hear my voice, but they are engraved on my heart, and I love them as my children.”103 On Memorial Day, four hundred veterans trudged past his window as he stared down at them. Afterward, he slumped in his armchair and yielded to dreamy reflections as their martial music faded away down the block.

  Despite Grant’s grave situation, Twain was galvanized by the projected sales for his book and hovered over every aspect of publication. By late May, he boasted that he and Charley Webster had collected 100,000 orders for the two-volume boxed sets. To cater to this robust demand, they had lined up twenty presses and seven binderies to crank out the books. Twain now predicted staggering sales: 300,000 sets, or 600,000 individual volumes.

  In mid-May, when Grant’s physicians wondered how to spare him the fierce heat of a Manhattan summer, his friend Joseph W. Drexel made an offer he could not resist. Saratoga Springs, a stylish resort in upstate New York known for fine summer weather, mineral waters, and a Thoroughbred racetrack, had become a favorite haunt of Wall Street financiers. Drexel was a minor partner in the Hotel Balmoral, recently opened at the peak of Mount McGregor, 1,100 feet above sea level; just down the road he had built a charming, roomy cottage that he placed at Grant’s disposal. His associate W. J. Arkell later confessed he had hoped that if Grant “should die there, it might make the place a national shrine—and incidentally a success.”104 The doctors loved the idea of Grant breathing in pine-scented mountain air, free from summer heat, mosquitoes, and noxious city vapors. Excited by escaping from East Sixty-Sixth Street, Grant told a reporter that he walked around his room after breakfast “getting himself in condition for long tramps through the woods after he got in the country.”105 After Grant suffered a bad day and postponing the trip was reluctantly broached to him, he exclaimed, “Now or never!”106

  Early on the morning of June 16, 1885, a shrunken man with white hair and a gray-flecked beard—Grant had now dropped sixty pounds—shuffled from 3 East Sixty-Sixth Street and stepped into bright sunlight. Despite a sweltering day, he stood bundled in a black coat and black beaver hat, a white scarf concealing a neck tumor “as big as a man’s two fists put together,” wrote a journalist.107 Grant was accompanied by Julia, Fred and Ida, Nellie, and five grandchildren, plus Dawson, Terrell, and Dr. Douglas. A carriage bore them to Grand Central Depot, where Grant disembarked and moved slowly toward the train, leaning on his cane, his slippers scraping the pavement. He traveled aboard a private car owned by William H. Vanderbilt, which was emptied to make room for two bulky leather armchairs that enabled Grant to sit on one and rest his legs on the other. As the train chugged upstate, small crowds gathered at stations and crossings and waved as he sped by. Once at Mount McGregor, he boarded a narrow-gauge railroad that lifted him to the summit. With customary grit, he tried to totter up the last stretch of dirt path alone, aided by his cane, under a welcoming arch that proclaimed, “Our Hero.”108 When his strength failed, two husky police officers deposited him in a wicker chair and carried him the remaining distance to the cottage.

  The house was painted a rich gold color, trimmed in brown and faced with dark green shutters. Joseph Drexel had furnished it expressly for Grant’s stay, knowing he would be largely restricted to the first floor. Grant’s two black leather armchairs faced each other in
a corner bedroom, right off the porch, so he could sleep sitting up and write with a board across the armrests. For pain relief, he took a cocaine-and-water solution and received periodic injections of brandy and morphine to pump up his heart rate. Doctors had to keep scouring dead matter and debris from his mouth. Grant immediately scratched away at his manuscript. “I have worked faster than if I had been well,” he told Twain. “I have used my three boys and a stenographer.”109 Even when Julia coaxed him onto the verandah for rest, he yearned to get back to work. The work sustained him, giving him a reason to soldier on. “It is very pleasant to be here,” he told her, “but I must go to my writing or I fear my book will not be finished.”110 When he sat on the porch, often in a silk top hat, hundreds of onlookers sauntered by to steal glimpses of him from the pathway leading up to the hotel. Frail, emaciated, starving to death from his inability to eat, he wore warm clothing in the early summer heat. His wit never abandoned him. Sneaking peeks at news headlines, he told Dr. Shrady that The New York Times has been “killing me off for a year. If it does not change, it will get it right in time.”111

  Racing against the Grim Reaper, Grant put in several hours of work per day, often pausing, short of breath, after an hour. Unable to talk any longer, he kept a pad and pencil at his side, scribbling tiny notes to family and doctors. “About an hour ago,” he wrote to Dr. Douglas, “I coughed up a piece of stringy matter about the size of a small lizard.”112 In another message he wrote, “I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”113 One day, when he seemed to drift off into the twilight of death, he suddenly awoke. “I was passing away peacefully and soon all would have been over,” he wrote. “It was like falling asleep.” There was something poignant about Grant as he mutely raised his eyes, searching the faces of interlocutors. As Buck said, “His eyes were always expressive and it hurt me to look at him and see his suffering . . . Watching him suffer was the hardest thing I have ever been through.”114