Commanders-in-Heat V: Manuscript or Morphine (Part I)

Ulysses S. Grant, Terminal Author

Drop While It's Hot

Commander-in-Heat is a series about Presidential Clearance Season. If you’re a president looking to beat the heat this summer, bad news: There’s a good chance you won’t. A third of all POTUS have died in June, July, and August.

Commander-in-Heat: A Republic, If It Can Survive You

Commander-in-Heat II: Is June James Season?

Commander-in-Heat III: The June 6

Commander-in-Heat IV: James Madison Declined to Die for the Bit

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Commanders-in-Heat: Manuscript or Morphine (Part I)

Gen. U.S. Grant writing his memoirs, Mount McGregor, June 27th, 1885 (Library of Congress)

The pain began in earnest in the fall of 1884, disguised as an ordinary sore throat. Ulysses S. Grant—Civil War general, two-term president, national symbol of battered endurance—ignored it until he couldn’t.

He had more pressing concerns. He’d just been financially annihilated in what we’d now call a Ponzi-style scheme. His son’s business partner, Ferdinand Ward, had squandered Grant’s military savings, Julia’s fortune, and the weight of his name to the firm of Grant & Ward. He was left with $80.

Harper's Weekly cover of Grant, weighed down by the problems of his administration (including Santo Domingo, the Financial Crisis, the KKK, and many others) as a copperhead snake wraps around his leg and various dogs nip at his heels while wearing the names of newspapers on their collars.

Then it became impossible to swallow. To eat. To sleep.

Diagnosis: cancer of the tonsillar fossa. Inoperable.

“I am a verb,” he had once said. He wasn’t the story. He was the action. No performance, no preamble. Just motion, outcome, history written in the wake. While others postured, Grant advanced. He wasn’t described—he happened.

Now his body betrayed him with every breath, every word.

By the summer of 1885, his voice was gone. His strength dwindled. And still, he refused to stop. “I do not sleep though I sometimes doze,” he wrote. “I read a good deal and try to write a little, every day.” The writing was not optional. It was survival.

Mark Twain, recognizing the historic gravity of his memoirs, made an offer. He’d give Grant 75% royalties if he’d allow Twain’s fledgling publishing house to produce them. Grant agreed. It would be his final campaign.

Ulysses Grant, half-length portrait, facing left; surrounded by nine scenes of his career from West Point graduation in 1843 to Lee's surrender in 1865, including artillery crew in the Tower of Chapultepec, Mexico, 1847; drilling Volunteers, 1861; Fort Donelson, 1862; Shiloh, 1862; Siege of Vicksburg, 1863; Chattanooga, 1863; appointment by Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, 1864. (Library of Congress.)

He dictated when he could. Scrawled when he had to. His doctors packed his throat with cocaine-soaked gauze. He sat upright in a chair because lying down choked him. Julia was always nearby. Sometimes he worked from the townhouse on East 66th Street in Manhattan.

As the heat thickened and the city’s stench—rotting garbage, horse shit, hot iron—soured the air, he was moved to a cottage on Mount McGregor in upstate New York: a borrowed perch of pine, fog, and isolation.

There, the final blitz began.

Grant writing on the porch.

“Let us have peace,” he had once written. But in these last weeks, he didn’t want peace. He wanted control—of the ending, of the record, of how his failures were weighed against his victories.

And he wanted accuracy. Grant refused to spin or sanitize. He left in his worst defeats—Cold Harbor, political blunders, years of scandal-ridden service. He knew that credibility couldn’t be commanded; it had to be earned. In doing so, he became even more commanding.

He refused morphine until the very last days, fearing it would cloud his thoughts.

“I am now very much better...but I do not deceive myself,” he wrote to Twain. “I expect to live for ten or twenty days. I hope to complete the work.”

Twain watched his friend shrink to a husk. “If we had had him two months earlier,” he said, “we could have saved him.”

On July 18, 1885, Grant completed the manuscript.

On July 23, at 8:08 a.m., he died. Julia was by his side. So was a clockmaker named Sanford, winding a pocket watch in the next room, unaware of the silence that had just settled.

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant were published four months later and sold over 300,000 copies—outselling every American book at the time except Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Julia earned more than $450,000 in royalties (over $14 million today).

Writers and critics took note. Henry James admired its clarity. Twain called it “a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.” Sherman wept when he read them.

Grant didn’t just write his own ending. He monetized it, weaponized it, and made sure no one else got the last word.

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