Grant's Memoirs: A Ponzi Scheme, Mark Twain and a Race Against Cancer

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In the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant sat wrapped in blankets on a porch in upstate New York, unable to speak, writing to finish a book before throat cancer killed him. This episode explains how a two-term president ended up penniless. After a self-funded world tour drained his savings, Grant joined his son Buck and investor Ferdinand Ward in the brokerage Grant and Ward. Ward used Grant's name to hint at secret government contracts and ran a Ponzi scheme, and in May 1884 the firm collapsed, wiping out the fortune Grant believed he had. That autumn he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.

Articles for Century magazine paid $500 each, and Century offered a 10 percent royalty for a full memoir until Mark Twain intervened. Twain proposed a subscription sale through his own firm, with about 10,000 agents, many of them Union veterans, selling with dummy books, and offered a 70 percent royalty and a $25,000 advance. Grant wrote 25 to 50 pages a day, often refusing cocaine swabs to keep his mind clear, and finished on July 18, 1885, five days before he died. The episode also looks at what the memoir includes, omits, and argues.

A rumor that Twain ghostwrote the book began with former staffer Adam Badeau, but the manuscript is largely in Grant's hand.
Grant called the Mexican-American War one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.
He described arriving at Appomattox in a mud-spattered private's blouse while Lee wore full dress uniform.
Agents pre-sold 350,000 two-volume sets, and in its first year the book outsold Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Julia Grant received about $450,000 in royalties within three years, over $16 million today.

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