The best part: it was published in by the (ultimately doomed) publishing house Mark Twain started, and commissioned mostly as a charity towards Grant, who was broke and dying. Twain was expecting something lifeless and dull that could be rewritten; he got a flawless memoir.
https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1338623044034629632
Both men made a bundle off the memoir. Grant used it to pay off his creditors and settle his family safely. Twain, alas, poured the money into a doomed typesetting machine, got beaten to market by linotype, and spent the 1890s on lecture tour trying to pay off his own creditors.
Out of respect for Grant, Twain appears to have paid Grant royalties that were unprecedented--Wikipedia says 30%, with his widow ultimately netting around $12 mm, inflation adjusted. Grant reciprocated by writing furiously while the cancer ate through his body, 25-50 pages a day.
At the last, he was in constant pain from a tumor in his neck "as big as two men's fists put together", unable to swallow solid food, barely able to walk. He completed the memoir, set the pen down, and died less than a week later.
That's the grit that won us the Civil War.
That's the grit that won us the Civil War.
The end is a note that he's gotten kind wishes from all over, including the Confederacy, to which he adds "It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to the end."
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