It Happened Here -- Ulysses S. Grant on Horses, Smoking, Dying and Determination

The General loved horses and had been an exceptional horseman. On foot he was described as “an ordinary scrubby looking man (who) gets over the ground queerly. He does not march, nor quite walk but pitches along as if the next step would bring him on his nose” (Flood 108.) but on horseback he was magnificent. Years before, as a Cadet at a graduation exercise at West Point he and a horse named York made a record breaking jump that left the spectators breathless, and remained an Academy record for 25 years.(Flood 24. Perry13.) During the Mexican War he made a desperate ride to order up more ammunition. Racing down a two mile street exposed to enemy gunfire, he hung from the side of his mount, shielding himself from the enemy and galloping  at breakneck speed the whole way. He delivered his orders unscathed as he was able to ride in and out of the Mexicans' fields of fire before the Mexican troopers had time to respond. (Flood 108-109) 
 

near Track Entrance, Goshen

So when Alden Goldsmith a prominent horse breeder invited  Grant and  C.E. Meade, a famous journalist to his Walnut Grove Horse Farm in Goshen, New York, the former President was delighted to accept. This November of 1884 was not the first time Grant had visited Goshen. Over a decade earlier, while President, he had come to Goshen, staying in a house on Main Street and watching the trotters race from the vantage point of the owners barn, in back. General Grant thoroughly enjoyed himself as they toured the farm admiring the fine horses, examining the season's crop of new colts, and swapping horse stories.  

210 Main St., Goshen

Before they parted, however, Grant made an announcement that ominously foretold of difficult times ahead for the General. Giving his cigar case to one of of the two, Grant carefully selected a cigar and lit it. “Gentlemen, this is the last cigar I shall ever smoke. The doctors tell me I will never live to finish the work on which my whole energy is centered these days (his Memoirs) if I do not stop indulging in these fragrant weeds.” (Flood 110.)
 
Grant loved his cigars and had smoked from six to twenty five a day. Before he smoked cigars he chewed tobacco and smoked a pipe, which his wife Julia hated. She would regularly throw Grant's pipes away..  In 1862, Admiral Samuel Foote, commander of the gunboats attacking Fort Donnelson in Tennessee had been wounded and Grant went to him to confer on strategy. The admiral offered him a cigar which he put in his pocket. Later he lit the cigar and had started to smoke it when a staff officer rode up and told him the Confederate forces were making a vigorous attack. Grant forgot about the cigar, which went out, but he continued to carry it throughout most of the day as he went among his troops issuing orders and directing the battle. Grant's successful attack made him a national hero and his terms offered to the Confederate General, “unconditional surrender” made U.S. Grant a celebrity bringing him to the attention of Lincoln, as well. Newspaper accounts portrayed him as having smoked his way through the entire battle and for weeks to come, an adoring Northern public sent him cigars – tens of thousands of boxes of them! Grant gave away what he could, but from then on, cigars were a regular part of his life. (Flood 107-110)


It was a peach, not a cigar, that was the first harbinger of trouble for General Grant, early in June 1884. The General had complained of a sore throat but had paid it no mind until later that week Julia had set out a bowl of peaches and Grant had helped himself to one. An intensely sharp stinging sensation accompanied his first swallow of peach, and in fact he thought he had swallowed a bee. Several attempts to rinse his throat only increased his discomfort. Julia wanted him to go see a doctor but the stubborn Grant would not hear of it. His personal physician was abroad and besides, he was preoccupied with other problems. (Flood 73-75)

The personal problems that weighed so heavily on Ulysses Grant in the summer of 1884 were financial. As a retired United States Army General, Grant would have been eligible for a comfortable pension, but when he became President of the United State the law required him to give up that pension, and there was no pension for retired Presidents. (It would not be until the Presidency of Harry Truman after World War II that Congress finally voted pensions for former Presidents.) 

One of Grant's sons, Buck, a budding Wall Street financier, had introduced him to Ferdinand Ward and James D. Fish.  Ward and Fish offered them partnerships for $100,000 each in a new investment firm to be titled Grant and Ward.  President Grant was offered a part time position for a handsome salary but was not involved in daily operations, except for signing occasional documents and lending his prestigious name to the company.  At first, the firm did extremely well with the initial investors receiving a 40% dividend, when the average stock exchange return on investment was 5.5%! Most of the company's liquid assets were held in the Marine Bank, another Ward and Fish  company.  When New York City, the other major depositor, made a large withdrawal,  a panicky Ferdinand Ward asked Grant to raise another $500,000 to keep the bank solvent. Grant did, asking help from friends and colleagues.  Then Ward fled with his check.  An investigation revealed the firm of Grant and Ward had solicited $16million from investors but had made only $6000 worth of stock purchases.  Most of the money had gone to Ward and Fish, and to paying the early investors an exorbitant dividend to encourage other people to invest.--one of the first iterations of the "Ponzi scheme."

Not only was Grant "broke" but he felt tremendous responsibility to others he had asked to invest.

The failure of Grant and Ward would lead Grant to make a decision he had previously avoided. For years friends and publishers had been trying to get him to write about his wartime experiences. There was a continuing strong interest in the Civil War. Many books had been published and many of the war's generals and other participants had written their stories, but Grant had not. The General didn't see himself as a writer and was somewhat skeptical of what he could add to a story that was already being extensively told. In January, Century Magazine, a respected national periodical first approached the General about contributing to a proposed series on the Civil War to be written by some of the war's most important figures. Grant was asked to write articles on the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness and Chattanooga. At that time he had shown no interest, but now he was feeling  burdened with a sense that he needed to do all he could to provide for his family. Although his throat continued to trouble him a great deal, the General threw himself into his task and produced  an article on Shiloh. The editors at Century Magazine were delighted, but delight turned to dismay when they read Grant's piece– essentially, a dry analytical “after action” report that an officer might typically submit to his superiors. With some trepidation the Century Magazine's associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson approached Grant to ask him to rewrite the piece, advising him to make it “like a talk he might make to friends after dinner, some who would know all about the battle, and some nothing at all.” He told him the public was especially interested in his perspective, what he “planned, thought, saw and did.” Grant did not take offense, but instead took Johnson's criticisms to heart. Johnson said of his work with him, “no one ever had an apter pupil” and Grant found something he thoroughly enjoyed. (Flood 56-60)

As his condition worsened, Grant went to his physician followed by several specialists and learned he had a cancerous tumor.  In the weeks and months that followed, the pain became constant and severe. Grant was reduced to primarily a liquid diet. He described drinking water like “drinking molten lead.” (Flood 89.) Throat swabs of “cocaine water,” brandy and morphine would help for a while but they left him fuzzy headed and he could not work. (Flood 198.) Writing, itself, was often Grant's only relief. The old soldier's abilities to focus on the tasks at hand and wall himself off from the 

fears, fatigues and discomforts he had felt on the battlefield served him admirably in this current battle. 

One morning in mid-November Fred Grant and his father were about to sign the contract they had just received from Century Magazine for a book of Grant's wartime memoirs when they had a visitor--Samuel Clemens (aka. Mark Twain). Dramatically stopping the former President from signing,  Clemens  outlined a proposal Clemens offered to present to his publisher.  Saying that Century Magazine grossly under-appreciated the market for his memoirs, Clemens proposed  his book should be widely advertised and sold by subscription-enlisting veterans. With potential readers including hundreds of thousands of veterans contacted to buy the book and making an initial payments for the book, before printing began, Clemens believed the book could be huge, but not entail the risks a large publication run might pose; becoming much more successful than a book simply printed and deposited on bookstore shelves. After several days of hesitation the Grants agreed and the next day, Clemens presented Grant with a $50,000 advance check.(Flood 99-103. Perry 82-90, 115-117.)

Rte 9, Wilton

Through the first half of 1885 Grant continued to battle his cancer, and write with organizational help from one of his sons and stenographic help from a former wartime aid, Adam Badeau. Sometimes the pain would be so bad for days that he could not write, but then he would rally and soldier on.

News of his illness had leaked out and his apartment in New York City was besieged by newspaper reporters, curiosity seekers, well wishers and people of all sorts offering him home remedies. By early June it was getting hot in the city and Grant and his doctors decided he needed a cooler, quieter place away from the crowds.  The owner of the new Balmoral hotel, outside of Saratoga offered him the use of a "cottage" on the extensive grounds of the hotel.  The "cottage" was actually a big two story house with a large room suitable for an office/bedroom on the first floor and a spacious wrap-around porch on three sides.  His family purchased for him a "bath chair"--a large wheeled chair that looked like a cross between a modern wheelchair and a rickshaw, first developed for spa treatments in Bath, England.

 

The plan was that he could be wheeled around the porches to take in the cooling, pines scented breezes from whichever direction they happened to blow. A short distance away was an overlook where the family hoped to take the General for an occasional change of scenery.

Mt. McGregor Rd., Wilton, off U.S. 9

On the afternoon of July 19^th Grant put down his pencil and handed his writing tablet to his stenographer, who for the last month had mainly assisted him by reading back to him the drafts, that Grant himself had written out. He was finished. His memoirs, which he completed in just under a year, would fill two volumes, 1,215 pages, – 291,000 words. They would be critically acclaimed, and frequently compared, favorably, to Caesar's Commentaries. Julia would receive a check for

$ 200,000 and eventually paid a total of $450,000, in royalties.

The following day, Grant suggested to his doctor they take the bath chair to the eastern overlook. Grant returned pale and exhausted. The next four days his condition worsened, as his family were summoned and gathered around him. The General began to drift in and out of consciousness. On the morning of July 23d, he died. His son Fred impulsively stopped the clock on the mantle of the room Grant occupied, slept in and wrote in throughout much of the summer. The room at “Grant Cottage” has been kept as it was that Thursday morning. The mantle clock reads 8:08.


Flood, Charles Bracelen.  Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's heroic last year.  2011  
Perry, Mark. Grant and Twain:  the story of a friendship that changed America.  2004

Marker of the Week--

Q.--Who is buried in William Few Jr.' s tomb?
A.--Not William Few Jr.! 

If this marker strikes you as a little odd, it does me too.  William Few, Jr. was a legitimate founding father of Georgia who organized militia resistance to the British, served in the Congress under the Articles of Confederation and was a delegate to the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Few was elected one of the first U.S. senators from Georgia, then served as a federal judge of the Georgia circuit. In 1799 he retired and moved to Manhattan where he believed he could better further his business interests. Few became president of City Bank of New York and an assemblyman in the New York Assembly, then, City Alderman followed by other positions. He retired to Fishkill-on-Hudson (Beacon) in1815; dying and buried there in 1828.

Protestant Reformed Church, Rte 9D, Beacon

In 1973, in the run-up to the American Revolution Bicentennial, Georgia asked for their founding father back. New York and the Protestant Reformed Church of Beacon complied.

It Happened Here--The Little Pilot House on the Hill

 

Mark Twain. The name brings to mind the image of a man dressed in a white linen suit, bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows ensconced in a little pilothouse-of-a-study, on a hill overlooking the River, writing – writing about life on the Mississippi, writing about growing up in a little river town along its banks, writing about a boy's great adventure running away from home with a fugitive slave on a raft on that great river, while the smoke curls up from the omnipresent cigar of the writer, and beneath his perch life hurries on in one of the fabled river town (Is it Cairo or Vicksburg, St. Louis or Memphis?)

All of these images ring true, except the last one. The little “pilot house-of-a-study” does not look down on the storied river towns of Cairo or St. Louis, Vicksburg or Memphis. Instead it was located near Elmira, NewYork, overlooking Elmira and the not-so-mighty Chemung river. How did this come to be?

In the summer of 1867, Samuel Clemens, the man behind the emerging persona fell in love – smitten in a classic romantic, Victorian fashion. Clemens was a moderately successful young writer bound for Europe and the Holy Land looking for material for his next book. A fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia Langdon. He could not tear himself away from the image of the slender, doe eyed, child–woman of the photograph, and begged Charley for an introduction when they returned. Eventually, Charles brought his sister Livy to meet the “wild humorist of the Pacific slope” who had shown so much interest in her. Visits and dinners with the family, and carefully chaperoned outings followed. Clemens determined almost immediately she was “the One” and embarked on a formal courtship. 

 

A lengthy engagement followed as Clemens used his money from a successful career as a lecturer, or “platform speaker”, and a loan from Livy's family to buy into a Buffalo newspaper, and embark on a career as a newspaper editor.

 Platform lecturers were a natural outgrowth of the religious revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century, where traveling speakers would preach to audiences in local churches, halls, opera houses, theaters, and even open fields. On their heels came a variety of moral crusaders – abolitionists, temperance advocates, and women's rights advocates, to be followed by spiritualists, scientists, history and travel lecturers feeding an ever-growing appetite for entertainment. Clemens followed his natural ability to entertain people by telling stories.   By the late 1860's his alter ego “Mark Twain” was well along in his development and “Twain” could command a healthy fee of $100 an evening. “Doors open at 7:30, trouble begins at 8:00”, his advertising posters read, and there were plenty of people looking for his kind of “trouble”.

 

While the irreverent, wise-cracking Mark Twain was holding forth on the lecture circuit and had penned numerous newspaper articles and had his first successful books , The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, and The Innocents Abroad, Sam Clemens in his private life longed for the Victorian Era's version of the American Dream.  In Livy he found the perfect Victorian wife who he could idealize and idolize; someone who would make for him a proper home, help him maintain a social life, care for him and bear and raise his children. Clemens would also look to her to reform him; to keep him from drifting into bad habits and curb the wildness in him that ostensibly, every Victorian man, and, especially, the creator of Mark Twain was heir to.  In time Livy would also become Mark Twain's personal editor, censoring any jokes or stories she thought would be too offensive to any segment of his audience. (This would be important because if Mark Twain developed a reputation for being too vulgar, his middle and upper middle class followers – men, and especially women, might abandon him in droves!)  But, at the time of his marriage, a large society wedding, Sam Clemens looked forward to sending Mark Twain into, at least, semi-retirement, while he took up the respectable position of newspaper editor and Livy's family bought them a luxurious three story brownstone mansion in Buffalo.

 But after several years, marred by personal tragedies, Clemens was feeling bored and unfulfilled. Together, Sam and Livy reached a decision.  They would sell the newspaper and the sell large house in Buffalo. They would go to live near several close personal and literary friends in Hartford and Sam would return to writing and platform speaking.
 

Over the next few years they built a whimsical three story house with gables and porches and a tower in East Hartford, and became immersed in the literary and social life of their little community. It became clear, however, that between lecture tours, and social obligations Sam was finding little uninterrupted time to write. Summers provided the only respite when the family left the summer heat of Hartford to stay with Livy's sister, who had inherited from their father a small farm, on the edge of an abandoned limestone quarry in the hills above Elmira. 

Sam marveled at the quiet and the ease with which he could write there. The third summer the family returned to “Quarry Farm,” his sister-in-law had a surprise for him. She had built him a little study, overlooking the old quarry, a hundred yards or so from the main house, away from the hubbub and crying of children, the bustling of servants and the constant stream of visitors. Eight sided, the little study had large windows on every side, and resembled the pilot houses of the old river steamboats where Sam Clemens practiced the profession he loved, so many years before. It was just big enough for a sofa, table and a few chairs; it even had a small fireplace for chilly summer mornings. Sam Clemens loved it, (and so did Mark Twain.) 

The slower pace of life at Quarry Farm, gave Clemens time to sift through the his life's memories for materials he would  use in his two greatest novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. The summers at Quarry Farm would lead him to conversations that would profoundly influence his work.

 

In the summer of 1872 he met John T. Lewis a freeborn black man from Maryland who became Twain's model for Jim, the fugitive slave in Huckleberry Finn. The leisurely hours spent with him trading stories of boyhood adventures awakened in Twain the germ of the idea for these books.

Sam Clemens had grown up with slavery and had lived among slaves in his Missouri boyhood home. To some extent he had become inured to the mistreatment whites inflicted on blacks, and his experiences little resembled the catalogue of melodramatic horrors and egregious behaviors that his neighbor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, portrayed in her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. But like most whites, he was largely unaware of the more nuanced and subtly evil and destructive injuries that  slavery, and the racism that continued after slavery, inflicted upon blacks .

Front Porch at Quarry Farm. Elmira

The summer following Clemens conversations with John Lewis, Sam had a chance encounter with Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, the black cook for the Cranes. What followed was a long conversation with her on the front porch of the main house at Quarry Farm. Clemens had made an off handed comment that she always seemed bright and cheery and from that they fell into a long conversation of the “old times,” before the war. Sam and Livy listened spellbound as “Auntie” Cord described the tender relationships she had had with her husband, and the life-long anguish she felt when she was permanently separated from her husband and seven children by her owners. Clemens was deeply affected and suspended work on his current project to write, in southern black dialect “ A True Story” which he published in the Atlantic Monthly. His friend and editor William Dean Howells would comment, this piece 'leaves all other stories of slave life infinitely far behind.' 
 

Clemens reflections and experiences at Quarry Farm would give a depth and subtlety to his writing and help turn an adolescent adventure story (Huckleberry Finn) into a literary work that  Earnest Heminway would call “the best book we've had...All American writing comes from that.” 

Over the years, a steady stream of writings poured forth from the little study. Twain worked on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (pub.1876), A Tramp Abroad (pub.1880), The Prince and the Pauper (pub.1881), Life On the Mississippi (pub.1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pub.1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (pub.1889) and numerous short pieces and lectures, from his little refuge looking down on Elmira.

In 1952 the little “pilot house on the hill” was moved from Quarry Farm to the center of the Elmira College Campus, to protect it from vandalism, where it continues to inspire young writers and students in the Mark Twain studies program there.