Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [57]
Opportunity appeared from, of all people, one of his sons, Ulysses Grant, Jr. Buck Grant had made an advantageous marriage and gone into business on Wall Street with capital provided by his father-in-law. His partner was Ferdinand Ward, a plausible and attractive young man with a certain business flair. Buck Grant, like his father, was a true believer in other people’s business schemes, and it seemed to him logical for his father to sink his remaining capital into the firm of Grant & Ward and make a fortune. It is a measure of Grant’s enduring—and endearing—naïveté that he was persuaded to attempt to become a Wall Street tycoon—few things were as clear as Grant’s poor judgment about money and schemes to make money—yet that is precisely what he decided to do.
Buck was an innocent dupe, Ward a clever con man. And the outcome was predictable. Ward’s idea was to use Grant as a front to attract investments from Civil War veterans. With Grant’s name on the letterhead the money flowed in, and Ward used each new investment to show a profit to the previous investors—what would come to be known as a Ponzi scheme. In the meantime Ward was stealing the partnership blind, which became only too shockingly apparent when Ward had to admit, in May 1884, that the firm was technically bankrupt. In one last burst of confidence trickery, Ward persuaded Grant to borrow $150,000 from the formidable William Vanderbilt, which Vanderbilt agreed to on Grant’s personal word. Then Ward vanished into protracted litigation and prison along with Vanderbilt’s $150,000, and Grant was left holding the bag, bankrupt, an object of scorn or pity (depending on which party you belonged to), by any standards ruined. No American ex-president had ever fallen so low, and except for Harding and Nixon, none ever would again.
Chapter Ten
RUINED AND SADDLED WITH DEBT, Grant was, in some respects, back where he had started when he was working at the leather shop in Galena. As always in his extraordinary life, however, a chance to rise was once again about to present itself. Once again he would need to go through pain and suffering; once again he would overcome them to win glory. This time the weapon would be the pen, not the sword.
In the aftermath of the failure of Grant & Ward, Grant had rather reluctantly agreed to write an account of Shiloh for Century Magazine, for a fee of five hundred dollars; more articles were called for, and it gradually dawned on the editor of the Century that a book might eventually come of all this. It also dawned on a former Confederate soldier, Samuel Clemens (more famous under his writing name of Mark Twain), that such a book would sell. Clemens was a publisher as well as a humorist and writer, and owned his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., having discovered that he could make more money by selling his books door-to-door than through conventional publishers and booksellers, who even then were thought to be behind the times when it came to marketing their product. Clemens knew the general slightly and dropped in to see him at East Sixty-sixth Street—Clemens was a celebrity, the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of a major talk-show host, as well as a famous writer, and he had the rare gift of being able to make Grant smile, so no doubt he was welcome. He was also a man with a vision, and proposed to secure for Grant at least $25,000 for his war memoirs, against very favorable royalty terms that would make him, once again, a rich man. Grant typically countered with the loyalty that he owed to the Century people, but Clemens promised him they would never match his offer or come up with anything like it, and he was proved right. The head of the Century—typically of a publisher—declared rather stuffily that he would never guarantee the sale of 25,000 copies of any book ever written, and Clemens, therefore, got