In July 1885, former American president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was dying – and writing his memoirs. My Thought for the Day reflects on the final days of his life.
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Thranness isn’t always a bad thing, you know
In the summer of 1885, Ulysses S Grant, former American President and hero of the Civil War, was dying of throat cancer. The previous year, Grant had invested in a Wall Street firm. When it collapsed, he lost his life savings.
That summer, Grant was working on his memoirs. The famous novelist Mark Twain had often listened to Grant wax lyrical about his experiences in war and politics. He recognised a good storyteller when he heard one. At Twain’s urging, Grant agreed to write.
Grant’s efforts over the last days of his life can be encapsulated in a word that would have been familiar to his Ulster-Scots ancestors: thran. Thran captures the sort of stubbornness required to persevere in the face of pain and impending death. When he finally stopped working in the middle of July, he had produced a massive, two-volume tome in less than a year.
Grant died a week later and never saw his memoir’s sensational success. It sold more than 300,000 copies and earned his widow the equivalent of £8.5 million in today’s money. It even out-sold Twain’s most recent book, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Grant had been poor before. A decade before the Civil War, he resigned from the Army after complaints about his drinking. He went to Missouri to farm land owned by his wife’s family.
Grant’s father-in-law had given him a handful of slaves. Grant, raised in the northern state of Ohio, was mocked by his neighbours for working in the fields alongside them.
Two years before the Civil War, Grant gave up the farm and moved to St Louis. He took one of the slaves, William Jones, to the St Louis Courthouse to grant him his freedom.
The official processing Grant’s request urges him to change his mind,* telling him how much money he could get by selling Jones instead. Grant refused the official, thran as ever.
Grant spent his last days on earth writing his memoirs. He did not mention Jones in them. We will never know why. But to my mind, it’s a story worth more than those many thousand words.
And thranness isn’t always a bad thing, you know.
* The exchange with the official is dramatized in a 2020 HBO documentary about Grant. A historical account of the event does not survive beyond the papers Grant signed to give Jones his freedom.