Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [59]
He knew he was dying, and very shortly the country knew it, too. Visitors came to pay their last respects, crowds of tourists came up from Saratoga Springs to stand and gawk at Grant; he was, as was so often the case in his life, on public display. In an age when deathbed scenes were popular and apt to be protracted, and when people died at home rather than in a hospital, Grant’s was perhaps the biggest and longest deathbed scene of all, and through it he kept working, surrounded by his family, and receiving occasional visitors.
It was a national drama of unprecedented proportions, and as his health declined and pain began to overwhelm his defenses, his enemies and his detractors fell away, one by one. Those who had thought he was wasteful of his men’s lives in the war, those who had opposed his presidency, those who had lost their life’s savings in the crash and depression that darkened his second term in office, or had unwisely invested their money in Grant & Ward because of his name, came to forgive him—dying made him again what he had once been, a national hero.
He finished the last chapter only a week or so before his death and was still struggling with questions about the maps and the proofs when death was almost ready to take him. On his own terms, and in his own way, he had fought death and won.
Now that it was too late, final honors poured in—Congress passed a bill restoring him to his rank in the army (he had had to resign in order to run for president); encomiums filled the newspapers; people of every rank, from all over the world, sent letters and cards; but Grant was past all that. He had finished his book, and now he was ready, perhaps even impatient, to die.
He would never know it, of course, but the book would indeed save the Grants—it would earn more than $450,000 in royalties, an immense sum for the day, but one that would have to be multiplied by twenty or more to give an idea of it in comparable modern terms. Sold door to door in several different editions, it became the biggest bestseller in American history, excluding the Bible.
All over the United States in the late nineteenth century, in the simplest of homes and farmhouses, one could always count on finding two books, the Bible and Grant’s Memoirs, side by side, on a shelf or on the mantelpiece, its penultimate words, “Let us have peace,” representing, so very clearly, the deepest feelings of America’s most successful general.
Epilogue
Why Grant?
THERE ARE MANY BIOGRAPHIES of Grant, so many that it seems to be something of a minor industry; some of them, like William S. McFeely’s Grant, are works of literature, many others more humdrum or narrowly military in interest. But from time to time it is necessary to remind Americans about Grant, first of all because his is a kind of real-life Horatio Alger story, exactly the one that foreigners have always wanted to believe about American life (hence the immense crowds that greeted Grant on his world tour), and that Americans want to believe about themselves. He came from a humble background; he had a harsh childhood; success eluded him at every turn no matter how hard he worked; then, all of a sudden, he rose to fame, to command, to power, to victory; then managed as few other people could have done (perhaps only Lincoln) to end the Civil War on a note of grace; served two terms as president; and ended his life by writing the most successful book in American literature. He was, in his lifetime, living proof of a substantial element of the American dream, and after his death continued to be for many years.
His presidency was clearly flawed, but what he sought as president—peace, prosperity, the binding together of North and South despite the wounds of four years of civil war, and good relations with foreign powers—was sought after by most Americans then and continues