Because had it not been for Ferdinand Ward — the Bernie Madoff of his time — Ulysses S. Grant would not have fallen off a financial cliff in May of 1884 into debt that would, in today’s money, amount to $1 million.
And had it not been for Grant’s fear of leaving his wife, Julia, a penniless widow, the former Union general and president likely never would have written the 1,250-page, two-volume memoirs he finished the following July, days before his death from the cancer that had encircled his throat.
»MORE STAFFORD: Commentary: Springfielders chance meeting in auto repair shop yields spiritual connection
Curt Fields will be relying on that memoir — considered a classic in military history — when his portrayal of Grant as general and president takes center stage Saturday in the Helmuth Rotating Gallery of the heritage center. Scheduled from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the event also will feature Civil War era music performed by event regulars Steve and Lisa Ball.
An educator who has portrayed Grant on C-SPAN and at the sesquicentennial celebrations of the battles of Fort Donnelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Fields said that although it is a word more often used to describe military action, “the best descriptor” for what the intensely suffering and financially ruined Grant accomplished in the final year of his life is “heroic.”
»MORE STAFFORD: Springfield man’s love of archaeology keeps growing
When the Grants were bilked by the “handsome, dashing and extremely glib” man known as the “Napoleon of Wall Street,” they found themselves living rent free in a house provided by William Vanderbilt. That may have been small comfort to the couple who owned nothing but their clothing and had neither income nor any apparent way to earn it.
“In those days, presidents did not get pensions,” Fields said, and Grant had disqualified himself from an army pension by resigning his position to become president.
Long having said “there have been enough books written about the Civil War,” Grant also had rejected most requests to do so until he produced a handful of articles for Century Magazine publishing for a series that became “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.”
»BUSINESS: JCPenney plans more closures amid slumping sales
Although noted for the clarity of his written battle orders, Fields said Grant’s first forays for Century were as dull and dry as an after-battle report. But after some advice from a Century editor that he include the personalities of those involved, the results were excellent.
At work in the summer of 1884 on the project — and already burdened by disastrous financial circumstances — Grant was at a party eating orange sherbet, when he felt a sharp pain in his throat as though he’d swallowed a wasp.
“Like most men, Grant didn’t like to go to the doctor,” Fields said, and with his personal physician touring Europe, he had a better excuse to postpone the visit. By the doctor’s October return Grant’s “entire throat is covered with squamous tissue,” Fields said, and the prognosis for the long time cigar smoker was “a few months — at best, maybe a year.”
»CRIME: In case you missed it: 3 crime stories in Springfield this week
Enter Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, a friend of Grant’s and the new partner in Webster Publishing Co. Aware of Grant’s illness and that he had not yet signed a contract to write his memoirs for Century, Clemens offered Grant a much more lucrative contract: A $50,000 check up front and 70 percent of the royalties after expenses.
Although Clemens was convinced Century was low-balling his friend, the eventual publishing arrangement “wasn’t anything clever he was offering Grant,” Fields said. The plan to sell the book by subscription is the same low-risk approach Clemens had used to sell his own books; at the same time, it was a godsend to the Grants.
As his cancer advanced, Grant suffered greatly. In July of 1885, doctors injected brandy into his veins to revive him from a coughing fit they feared would be fatal, and Grant recovered enough to write 50 more pages before the 16th of the month, when he said, in words that echo Jesus on the cross, “It is finished.”
»LOCAL: Robot helps Clark County boy, 6, attend school
During eight months of work done in growing discomfort and in the shadow of death, Grant not only wrote a work of two volumes and 293,000 words — “a third of the length of the Bible,” notes Fields — but one that has become such a classic that Harvard University Press published a completely annotated edition on Oct. 17, 2017. The editor of that new edition was John Marszalek, a past presenter at the Springfield symposium.
Although a patriotic wave led to an initial surge in sales after Grant’s death, Fields said the book has come to be regarded as the best military memoir ever written by any American and one of the best — if not the best — ever written.
The reason?
“The simplicity of his writing,” Fields says.
»SPORTS: Boys basketball: Springfield overcomes two pre-game technicals to beat Troy; Gordon leads Sidney
Just as in the messages he sent during a battle, “He did not write for posterity,” Fields said, “he wrote for clarity.”
This means the product of Grant’s final heroic act in life has survived not on style points, but for the substance of what the Ohio native who was one of the pivotal figures in American history had to say.
It also was a hard-fought and heroic victory over the Napoleon of Wall Street.
Grant not a failure, should be ‘in the top 10 presidents’
The critics of Ulysses Grant claim he was a drunk who won the Civil War because he was willing to trade more numerous Union lives for scarcer Confederate lives, then went on to head a presidential administration crippled by corruption due to the same naivete that led him to be bilked out of his personal fortune.
Curt Fields, one of the most successful Grant portrayers in the nation, says he is not a Grant apologist; but he is not hesitant to address what he sees as overdrawn criticisms of the American war hero and two-term president.
CRITICISM 1: Although he could not handle his liquor, Fields said, the clearest evidence that Grant was not an alcoholic or a "functioning alcoholic" was how extraordinarily well he functioned.
In four years beginning in 1861, Grant rose from a man making scratching out a living working for his father in a dry goods store in Galena, Ill., to being the first general since George Washington to be named an American lieutenant general, to the leader of 550,000 Union soldiers to the only general in American history to accept the surrender of three separate armies.
“In four more years,” Fields adds, “he becomes president of the United States” and serves two full terms. “That’s not the work of an alcoholic.”
CRITICISM 2: Grant was not a butcher, Fields said, but was a fighter who, in a brutal setting accomplished what others were unable to do: defeat the South.
“All of Grant’s predecessors for three years would go across the river, they would engage Robert E. Lee, Lee would maul them, and they would go back across the river to Washington city to lick their wounds.”
All those Union losses, Fields said, contributed nothing to the progress of the Union war effort.
All that said, Fields notes that when President Abraham Lincoln was about to name Grant to lead the Union war effort, Lincoln said he was the man for the job “because General Grant will do the terrible arithmetic” and continue to engage Lee until the war was won.
“He won because he was a good general and he would engage the enemy and keep him engaged,” Field said, adding this: “From May 4, 1864, when he led Union forces across the Rapidan River, until Lee’s surrender (on April 9, 1865,) there were four days when there was no direct contact” between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia.
CRITICISM 3: "Grant was scrupulously honest with not a whiff of any scandal," Fields said. "Nobody ever suspected Grant of being involved in any corruption."
Still, Fields says Grant did show a loyalty to others that would qualify as a “character flaw.”
Having been down and out himself before the Civil War, then endured its trials, “he always felt and said that, ‘The man who was with me in my hours of darkness’ would have his loyalty ‘in my hours of sunshine.’”
The result was that when his presidential duty called on him to order people to resign, “he could never bring himself to do that.”
Fields argues that Grant’s shortcomings as president must be balanced by his accomplishments. Reconstruction “could have been much worse than it was” were it not for Grant’s destruction of the early Ku Klux Klan and his efforts supporting reunification by ensuring that Confederate veterans were fairly treated after the war.
Fields also credits Grant for signing legislation creating the first National Park (Yellowstone); exploring the Isthmus of Darrien to create a route for what became the Panama Canal; and bringing long-term stability to the National Bank system by vetoing a bill that would have removed the country from the gold standard in the name of short-term financial gains for those who would have benefited.
“He made his mistakes. He trusted people too long, and it cost him,” Fields said. But he said he expects an ongoing re-evaluation of Grant’s years in office is going to put him “in the top 10 presidents, if not the top five.”
How to Go
What: Ninth Springfield Civil War Symposium featuring Curt Fields as Ulysses S. Grant
When 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday
Where: Heritage Center of Clark County, 117 S. Fountain Ave., Springfield
Admission: $60 for adults, $50 for members, $20 for students with student scholarships available
Registration: At the Heritage Center or by calling 937-324-0657
Note: Heritage Center is closed Mondays
About the Author