Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship - Softcover

Perry, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812966139 ISBN 13: 9780812966138

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005

Synopsis

In the spring of 1884 Ulysses S. Grant heeded the advice of Mark Twain and finally agreed to write his memoirs. Little did Grant or Twain realize that this seemingly straightforward decision would profoundly alter not only both their lives but the course of American literature. Over the next fifteen months, as the two men became close friends and intimate collaborators, Grant raced against the spread of cancer to compose a triumphant account of his life and times—while Twain struggled to complete and publish his greatest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.In this deeply moving and meticulously researched book, veteran writer Mark Perry reconstructs the heady months when Grant and Twain inspired and cajoled each other to create two quintessentially American masterpieces.

In a bold and colorful narrative, Perry recounts the early careers of these two giants, traces their quest for fame and elusive fortunes, and then follows the series of events that brought them together as friends. The reason Grant let Twain talk him into writing his memoirs was simple: He was bankrupt and needed the money. Twain promised Grant princely returns in exchange for the right to edit and publish the book—and though the writer’s own finances were tottering, he kept his word to the general and his family.

Mortally ill and battling debts, magazine editors, and a constant crush of reporters, Grant fought bravely to get the story of his life and his Civil War victories down on paper. Twain, meanwhile, staked all his hopes, both financial and literary, on the tale of a ragged boy and a runaway slave that he had been unable to finish for decades. As Perry delves into the story of the men’s deepening friendship and mutual influence, he arrives at the startling discovery of the true model for the character of Huckleberry Finn.

With a cast of fascinating characters, including General William T. Sherman, William Dean Howells, William Henry Vanderbilt, and Abraham Lincoln, Perry’s narrative takes in the whole sweep of a glittering, unscrupulous age. A story of friendship and history, inspiration and desperation, genius and ruin, Grant and Twain captures a pivotal moment in the lives of two towering Americans and the age they epitomized.

About this title

About the Author:

MARK PERRY, writer, reporter, and foreign policy analyst, has published articles in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including The Nation, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Newsday. His critically acclaimed books include Four Stars: The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders; Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA; Fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace; and Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. Perry lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One

“a man with fire”

Ulysses S. Grant never understood how to handle money. That was not true of his father, Jesse, who understood it so well that he became a successful and affluent businessman. A tanner by trade, Jesse Grant came to the Ohio country and opened a business in Point Pleasant, a small trading town on the Ohio River. Tanning is a dirty and bloody business, but it’s honorable and ancient: The apostle Paul was a tanner, a fact undoubtedly pointed out repeatedly by Jesse’s devout and dour Methodist wife, Hannah. Hannah Simpson was a strong-willed Pennsylvania woman who believed that work could save souls and who told people (apparently with some repetition) that she wanted to live “unspotted from the world.” People noted that she meant what she said. Hannah worked from sunrise to sunset, like her husband, Jesse, whose face was pockmarked by tannic acid but whose biceps were as hard as iron cannon—the result of throwing ungainly pickled hides out to dry.

Ulysses was Jesse and Hannah’s first child, born with the name Hiram Ulysses Grant in a single-room clapboard shack at Point Pleasant on April 27, 1822. Jesse worked hard for his new family, and eight months later the shack was replaced by a two-room house at Georgetown, twenty-five miles to the east. The move reflected Jesse Grant’s rising status and unerring business sense. Georgetown was not only on a major highway leading from Pittsburgh west into the rich farmlands of Illinois and Wisconsin, it was also in the middle of one of Ohio’s most expansive oak forests; oak bark, when mixed with water, makes tannic acid, the potion that produces tanned hides. Within five years, Jesse Grant had transformed his business from a small one-man operation into a burgeoning enterprise employing five workers and dozens of returning satisfied customers. With his profits Jesse acquired fifty acres of prime forest land, two small farms, and a two-story brick house. The house was sparsely furnished, as Hannah insisted, and over the next years she gave birth to five more children, two boys and three girls: Simpson, Clara, Virginia, Orvil, and Mary.

Just five years after coming to Ohio, Jesse Grant was a success. He not only owned a profitable tanning business, he was one of Georgetown’s most important citizens. He ran for office (as an abolitionist), participated in town meetings, and was a regular and outspoken contributor to the town newspaper, the Castigator. He designed and built the town jail and even started another business, opening a carriage service to western Ohio and points south. But Jesse was not well liked: He argued heatedly with Georgetown’s pro-southern elite (who were enriched by the region’s slave-dependent tobacco-trading industry), became a “Clay man” (and voted repeatedly for Henry Clay, that most eloquent of voices for the Union), shouted down his opponents at town meetings, and regularly and vocally proselytized for the Whig Party. As his employees were busy slinging hides, Jesse Grant stood in front of his store and argued about slavery. Jesse hated slavery: Before he came to Ohio, he was an apprentice tanner in Kentucky but left the state because, as he said proudly, it was poisoned by “the slavocracy.” It was his obsession with slavery and his sour personality that made Jesse disliked: His first son once commented that in that part of Ohio, antiabolitionist sentiment was so strong that Jefferson Davis might have been elected president.

That Jesse Grant could see the coming conflict was certain. He was ahead of his time. Though the nation was not yet divided by the slave question, the first cracks in the foundation of the Union were beginning to show. In the year that Ulysses S. Grant was born, Denmark Vesey was put on trial and executed in Charleston for plotting a slave uprising. Two years before, Henry Clay—then a rising young politician from the same Kentucky that Jesse abhorred—authored the Missouri Compromise, which saved the Union. The debate over slavery deepened in 1828, when Ulysses was just six, when John Quincy Adams signed the “Tariff of Abominations,” which favored the business interests of the North and the West over those of the South. South Carolina threatened secession. Two years later, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina debated the question of slavery on the Senate floor. The compromises and debates of the 1820s carried over into the next decade. In 1831, Nat Turner launched a bloody and unsuccessful slave rebellion in Virginia. In the years that followed, new “slave laws” were enacted throughout the South, and the trickle of African Americans that traversed the underground railroad, many of them through Ohio, became a torrent.

Jesse Grant was proud of his son Ulysses and showed him off to anyone who came into his store. The boy was strong and smart and understood more about horses than anyone Jesse knew. Horses came to Ulysses like money to Jesse. Throughout his life, Grant had an affinity for horses and could gentle the wildest in any herd. His gift with horses was obvious from an early age. When his mother was warned that her three-year-old son was crawling in the yard beneath horses’ hooves, she dismissed the danger. He will take care of himself, she said, and went back to her washing. Ulysses Grant found in horses a silent trust and compassion that was nonexistent at home. His mother never kissed or hugged him (“Well, Ulysses, you’ve become quite a great man, haven’t you,” she said coldly after his return from the war—and then went back to her work), and his father, while bragging about his son’s strength and spirit, rarely showed any affection. Jesse was self-made, pugnacious, outspoken, and hardworking, and he expected his son to be the same, so he demanded that Ulysses help in the shop at a very early age. Ulysses abhorred the backbreaking work and the animal blood, but he did it. At the age of fifteen, after his father suggested that he might follow him in the business, Ulysses told him he never would. “I’ll work at it though, if you wish me to, until I am twenty-one. But you may depend on it, I’ll never work a day longer at it after that,” he said.

Grant’s personality was formed in opposition to his father. Where Jesse was outgoing and outspoken, Ulysses was shy and contained. He grew up to be a man of few words, though those few, when spoken, were well chosen. His beliefs were held deeply, like his father’s, but his aversion to argument was developed at a very young age. While he served two terms as president, he was arguably the least political of any of our presidents, and while he enjoyed those most common of pleasures, smoking cigars and reading, he was nearly an ascetic. He bore the casual hooting and indiscreet bullyings of childhood, most of them the result of his father’s outspoken (and often obnoxious) personality, without complaint, as he would later bear the privations of soldiering. He was as fearless in battle as he was beneath the hooves of those horses in his mother’s yard, and several times during the Civil War he would look up, surprised, to see his staff scattering before the onslaught of an artillery barrage.

All of this might have come from his mother, Hannah Simpson, except that unlike her, he was never devout and viewed religion as he might have looked at cannonballs—a curious nuisance that caused more fear than harm and simply had to be tolerated. That he was intelligent was never in doubt, but he lacked scholarly brilliance. He mastered mathematics, as a child, simply by working at it. He worked diligently, but without remarkable insight. That perhaps was Grant’s most sterling quality. While not the tallest, or strongest, or brightest, or even the most insightful of men or generals, Grant brought a singular concentration to everything he did. When he failed, he would pick himself up and start again. As a child and later as a soldier, he was undeterred, unfazed, and unafraid. This might well have come from working in his father’s business, with older and stronger men, or perhaps from those he met on the road—as he drove his father’s hides to Cincinnati or farther south or west. His only truly unique and eccentric quality was his inability to turn back, to literally retrace his steps. If lost, he plunged on rather than retrace where he had been, and he sometimes went miles out of his way rather than return along a well-worn road. He commented on this himself, often, and admitted that it was an obsessive quirk that he simply could not correct. That oddity defined his life: He would set out to do something and would not stop until he got it done—and he would go someplace and get there.

If Jesse and Hannah were unaffectionate, they still placed great hope in their oldest son. His mother insisted that he receive a better education than his playmates, and while Ulysses was in his teens, Jesse told him that he would be expected to go to college, a privilege reserved for only the most well-educated, and affluent, children. Jesse made enough money to enroll his son in a number of private schools, including a “village school” run by Thomas White, a strict disciplinarian who gave his students a book, a desk, and little else. White expected his pupils to teach themselves, emphasizing the point by keeping at hand a switch made of hard cane bundled together. At the insistence of his parents, Grant next attended a private school in Maysville, Kentucky. He left home for Maysville at the age of thirteen and lived there with an aunt. He attended school during the day and studied at night. One year later, he was enrolled by his father at a private academy in Ripley, on the Ohio River, where the academic work was more difficult than any he had ever had. “They taught me that a noun was the name of a person, place or thing so often that I came to believe it,” he later said.

Jesse Grant’s son had big ideas. From the moment he began to lead his father’s buckboards out of Georgetown, Grant dreamed of becoming a river trader. He admired the well-dressed men striding onto the steamboats of Cincinnati, bound for those exotic river towns of St. Louis, Natchez, and New Orleans. He also thought of becoming a farmer, though this was far less romantic. But farming was a thing he could do, and it didn’t involve dipping his hands in animal blood. And that was good enough for him. It was not good enough for Jesse, however, or for Hannah, who had definite opinions about what their son could become. Downriver traders, Jesse thought, were thoroughly disreputable. Being one would not likely bring honor to the Grant family, and as for being a farmer, well, anyone could be a farmer—and most people were. The Grants, as Jesse would say, were not most people. In 1838, Jesse wrote to Ohio senator Thomas Morris about Ulysses, asking that Morris appoint his son to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Morris replied that he did not then have an appointment to give, but that Congressman Thomas Hamer did, if Jesse was willing to write to him.

It was an audacious request. Jesse had not thought of sending his son to West Point until his wife had suggested it, and she did so only after hearing that a neighbor’s son had failed the entrance examination. More important, Hamer and Jesse Grant were political enemies. While Jesse had campaigned for Hamer when Hamer ran for a seat in Ohio’s legislature, the two had had a bitter argument over President Andrew Jackson’s fiscal policies and had not spoken since. But Jesse swallowed his pride and wrote to Hamer, hoping that his former friend would remember how close they had once been. Hamer received Jesse’s letter on the last day of his term and immediately filled out the application for Grant’s admission. The application was to have lifelong ramifications for Grant: Struggling to remember the boy’s full name, Hamer appointed him to West Point as Ulysses S. Grant, using his mother’s maiden name as his middle initial. He then wrote to Jesse, burying the bitter feud: “I received your letter and have asked for the appointment of your son which will doubtless be made. Why didn’t you apply to me sooner?”

But being appointed to West Point was one thing, passing the entrance examination was another. The people of Georgetown, many of them offended by Jesse Grant’s presumption, believed that his son would never attend. “I’m astonished Hamer did not appoint someone with intellect enough to do credit to our district,” one of the townsmen told Jesse. Ulysses knew none of this and protested the appointment when he heard of it. He told his father that he thought he would not go. But, as he later recounted, “My father said he thought I would, and I thought so too, if he did.” Grant passed the entrance exam and, vowing secretly that he would never like West Point and that he would never be a soldier (no matter what his father thought), left for New York on May 15, 1839. He arrived, a little more than one week later, on the bluffs above the Hudson, to see his name posted with those of the others of the class of 1843.
R

It was then, and still is, a tradition at West Point that en- tering plebes receive a nickname. The West Point of Grant’s era is famous for such names. William Tecumseh Sherman (one class ahead of Grant) became “Cump,” while William Rosecrans (a devoted Catholic, gifted mathematician, and average general) became “Rosie.” Winfield Scott Hancock (who was named for the old general, and who repelled Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg) became “Win.” All of that is predictable, but how do you explain James Longstreet, who was known ever after as “Pete,” or George Pickett (a Virginian appointed by a then little-known congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln), who was so dandified that he had no nickname at all (and who graduated dead last in his class), or Lewis Armistead, who became “Lo”—for “Lothario”—and who died in the charge that Pickett commanded? As Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses Simpson Grant, so Ulysses Simpson Grant now became U. S. Grant or, more simply, “Sam.” No protests that he (Hiram, or Ulysses, or even U. S. Grant) would ever issue would change that name. Among his closest friends, from his plebe year forward, Ulysses S. Grant was “Sam” Grant, and so he would forever remain.

Grant entered West Point as the smallest cadet in his class. He stood barely five feet one, and he weighed just 117 pounds. He was issued a uniform that, in using language his father would understand, he described as being “as tight to my skin as bark to a tree.” It would have been easy to underestimate Grant. He struggled with his studies, but he rarely broke the academy rules, and he seemed to get along well with the upperclass officers. His class of seventy-seven comprised mostly boys from the South and the Northeast, with only a scattering of midwesterners. Grant endured his plebe year and stood aside when others protested, or openly rebelled, or were expelled for fighting or complaining. In that first year he never once received a demerit for disobedience or disrespect, a rarity among cadets in any age. He was well liked, but years later (when it would have been in people’s interest to regale listeners with stories of the famous cadet Ulysses S. “Sam” Grant), he was not well remembered. Pickett, Rosecrans, Longstreet, Sherman, and even future Confederate general Jubal Early (called “my bad old man” during the war by Robert E. Lee were legends at West Point. Grant was a plodding enigma.

Grant finished his first year near the bottom of his class, but he had come further than anyone dared imagine. While the people of Georgetown, Kentucky, might well have protested Grant’s appointment, no one could argue with his ability to concentrate, to apply himself single-mindedly to his weaknesses and master them. All the while, amid the sometimes vicious phys...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0812966139
• ISBN 13: 9780812966138
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352