The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant's Last Campaign

Preface

Preface THIS STUDY of the last year in the life of General Ulysses S. Grant is the outgrowth of a report on the Grant cottage at Mount McGregor, New York, prepared for the Office of State History, New York State Education Department, at the instance of Mr. Horace Willcox, Principal Museum Curator. Little research had been done on the site, which is owned by the state and kept open to the public, and a broad general study was needed as an aid to interpretive planning. The draft was submitted for review to Dr. John Y. Simon, of the Ulysses S. Grant Association at Southern Illinois University, editor of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, now in progress. Dr. Simon, after noting a few necessary corrections, expressed the belief that the report made a contribution to the literature on General Grant. He suggested that it be revised and amplified with further research, with a view to publication. The Office of State History gave its blessing to such a project. As I have had opportunity, I "have since done a very considerable amount of fresh research, and have expanded and revised the original report . Much new material, some of it relatively unused, has been woven into the text. Here and there is not only amplification but also modification of the original thesis. The final year of Grant's life, after a period of relative calm and obscurity, was one of drama, triumph, and tragedy. He became once more a conspicuous public figure as his struggle with sudden adversity and malignant disease developed. Bankrupted by an unscrupulous partner in Wall Street, he set out to xvii xviii Preface recoup his fortunes and those of his family by writing his recollections of the Civil War. Just launched on this enterprise, he was stricken by cancel'. The remaining months of his life were a desperate and agonizing struggle to complete the book before he died. The whole nation watched the drama as it unfolded. Grant's last days in New York City and on Mount McGregor, filled with pain and heroic effort at an unaccustomed but absorbing task, were followed with eager interest, growing sympathy , and admiration. The voices of his numerous enemies were stilled, and when he died, his task accomplished, there was universal mourning. Along with the main thread of the narrative, there are woven subsidiary themes with their own interest. The effort to make Mount McGregor, a fine scenic area not far from Saratoga Springs, into a paying summer resort reached its climax with Grant's stay on the mountain and his death there in the summer of 1885. The contest between the Century Company, which had started the general writing, and Mark Twain for publication rights to the general's book, was an interesting and sometimes amusing affair. Twain's own effort to help the general finish the book, when he found on his hands a dying author who was also a good friend, is a warmly human story. The personal animosities that developed among those close to the old hero, to whom they were all individua:11y devoted, and the note of greed that was struck as the smell of money began to rise from the book venture, are instructive. The success of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant as a publication was astonishing. There had never been anything quite like it in American publishing history. The general did not live to see it, but he knew before he died that his beloved wife would never be in want, and that relatives who had shared his losses in Wall Street would be provided for. He had fought off pain and death to some purpose, but to the point of exhaustion, adding one more splendid victory to those of his military career. There was nothing left worth struggling for. Still read today, the work is a model of straightforward dramatic narrative, covering the events of a tremendous epoch in American history. It re- Preface xix mains perhaps the greatest of all monuments to the man who, with Lincoln, preserved the United States intact. The cottage in which Grant completed the Personal Memoirs and died, 011 the top of Mount McGregor, was preserved by its owner and the general's old comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic. It was finally taken over by the State of New York, and is maintained for public inspection as one of...