He Couldn't Speak. He Kept Writing.

On the morning of May 6, 1884, Ulysses S. Grant walked into his Wall Street brokerage a wealthy man.

By that afternoon, he had $80 in his pocket.

The firm was called Grant and Ward, and it hadn't been his idea.

His son, Ulysses Jr., known as Buck, had gone into business with a young financier named Ferdinand Ward, a man newspapers would later call the Young Napoleon of Wall Street.

In 1884, Buck asked his father to join them. Grant agreed, putting up $100,000 in securities and lending the firm something Ward valued even more than the money: his name.

Ward was running a Ponzi scheme.

When it collapsed, it took Grant's entire fortune with it, along with the savings of the wealthy friends and extended family Ward had recruited using the Grant name as cover.

The former Commanding General of the Union Army, the man who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender, two-term President of the United States, was left with $80 to his name.

His wife, Julia, had $130 more, pulled from a cookie jar.

He was 62 years old.

That same year, a sharp pain at the back of his throat started bothering him. By October it was bad enough to see a specialist.

The diagnosis was throat cancer, almost certainly from a lifetime of cigars.

Grant asked his doctor directly if it was cancer. The doctor didn't answer. Grant didn't need him to.

He had, by every medical estimate available in 1884, months left to live.

Broke and dying, in the same year, past sixty. Most men would have called that enough.

Grant had one asset left that Ferdinand Ward had never touched: the story of his own life, and the fact that half the country still wanted to read it.

His friend Mark Twain, who ran a struggling publishing house and needed a hit almost as badly as Grant needed money, offered him an unusually generous deal, far better than the terms other publishers had put on the table.

Grant signed it in February 1885.

Then he went to work on the only battle left in him.

He wrote in longhand at first, in pencil, filling notebook after notebook.

As the cancer progressed, swallowing became agony, then speaking became impossible.

He kept going anyway, dictating whole chapters once his voice was gone entirely.

Some days he produced twenty-five, even fifty pages.

In June 1885, on his doctor's advice, the family moved to a quiet cottage at Mount McGregor in upstate New York, so his final weeks could be spent in easier air.

Word got out that he was dying there, working. Friends came to see him.

So did admirers, and even a few former Confederate officers who had fought against him twenty years earlier, all making the trip north to pay their respects while there was still time.

He kept writing through the visits.

He wrote through choking episodes so severe he sometimes vomited blood.

He wrote wrapped in blankets on the porch, propped up in a chair because he was too weak to sit unsupported.

He wrote because he had done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said his family's future depended on how many pages he could still produce before his body gave out entirely.

He finished the manuscript in mid-July 1885, just days before he died on July 23. [1]

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant became one of the best-selling books of the entire nineteenth century, outselling even Uncle Tom's Cabin in its first year.

Ten thousand agents, many of them Union veterans in their old uniforms, canvassed the North, selling the two-volume set door to door.

Julia Grant received roughly $450,000 in royalties over the following years, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen million dollars today. [2]

She never had to worry about money again.

The book itself outlasted the debt it was written to settle. It's still in print.

Historians still consider it one of the finest memoirs any American soldier or statesman has ever written.

That reputation was earned by a man who wrote most of it unable to speak, racing a disease that had already told him how the story would end.

He couldn't control the diagnosis, and he couldn't undo the swindle. He controlled the pages.

That turned out to be enough.

The Resilient Man publishes weekdays.

Sources

[1] Historical accounts of Grant's final months, including reporting from History.com, Smithsonian Magazine, the National Park Service, and the Grant memoirs archive

[2] Wikipedia, "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant," and multiple historical financial accounts of the memoirs' royalty payments to Julia Dent Grant