U.s. Grant: Man Of Letters (June 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 4)

U.s. Grant: Man Of Letters

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 4

In the spring of 1885, when he was less than three months away from death by cancer, General Ulysses S. Grant had a spirited exchange of letters with Adam Badeau, who was supposed to be helping him write his memoirs.

Badeau had been Grant’s military secretary during the final year of the Civil War, and some time after the war he had written a three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant . This has been a standard reference work ever since, but it had not been a great commercial success and now it occurred to Badeau that it would sink into the shadows forever, once Grant’s memoirs came out. Besides, to work on another man’s manuscript struck Badeau as sheer drudgery, he saw his own name vanishing from sight under the great weight of Grant’s name, and anyway he wanted to write a novel; so on May 2 he wrote to Grant demanding more money. Specifically, he wanted $1,000 a month, payable in advance, plus ten per cent of the entire profits from the memoirs.

Grant was combating poverty as well as cancer. The failure of the brokerage house of Grant & Ward had left him flat broke just at the moment he learned that the irritating sore in his throat that had bothered him so long was an inoperable cancer, and his one purpose now was to get royalties that would relieve his family from want. On May 5 he rejected Badeau’s claim in the most plain-spoken terms—and in the course of writing the letter unwittingly demonstrated that by the oddest turn of fate he had actually become what Badeau supposed himself to be: a man of letters.

Grant thought that Badeau was asking for altogether too much money, and said so flatly. What really irritated him, however, was Badeau’s implication that Grant could not finish his book without Badeau’s help. Grant’s pride as a craftsman had been offended. He thought that his own literary style was good—a belief that was entirely justified—and in any case if a book came out with his name on it, it was going to be his book and nobody else’s; he told Badeau that his conscience would not let him present a book as his work if he had not actually written it. His agonizing malady was now entering its terminal stage, he needed an amanuensis to help him organize some of the material, and he understood that he might die before the work was finished, in which case someone would have to arrange the final sections to make a coherent conclusion—but a ghost writer he did not want at all.

This is a little unexpected. Grant was a soldier; at one degree removed, he was a politician; and now he was writing a book, his only aim being to make money for his family. It should have been an open-and-shut case. If a hack could finish the job