Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War for the Union and served two terms as President of the United States, yet he spent the final year of his life racing against bankruptcy and a fatal cancer. After leaving office, the famously incorruptible general proved a disastrous judge of business partners, and in 1884 a Wall Street Ponzi scheme bearing his own name destroyed nearly everything he had.
The firm was Grant & Ward, a brokerage in which Grant invested alongside his son and the dazzling young financier Ferdinand Ward. Ward, hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Wall Street,” was in fact running a fraud, paying old investors with new investors’ money and inventing imaginary government contracts. When the scheme collapsed on May 6, 1884, Grant — who had put his savings and his name behind it — walked out of his office a pauper, reportedly left with about $80 to his name while his wife Julia had another $130.
Destitution arrived alongside disease. Later in 1884 Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer, almost certainly linked to his lifelong cigar smoking, and he understood he was dying with no estate to leave his wife. To provide for Julia and the family, the dying general undertook one last campaign: writing his “Personal Memoirs,” a two-volume account of his Civil War years, published through Mark Twain’s company on extraordinarily generous terms.
Grant laid down his pen on July 16, 1885, having written some 366,000 words in less than a year, and died on July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor, New York. The memoirs became a publishing triumph — both a literary masterpiece and a financial one — ultimately earning roughly $450,000 in royalties for his widow. The man who had been ruined by a swindle saved his family with his own pen in the last weeks of his life.
William Magear Tweed — known to New York and to history as ‘Boss’ Tweed — rose from a volunteer fire company on the Lower East Side to become the most powerful man in the city, the master of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, and the head of a ring of officials who looted the municipal treasury on a scale that has never been precisely measured. Contemporary estimates of what the ‘Tweed Ring’ stole between roughly 1865 and 1871 ranged from about $25 million to as much as $200 million; some modern historians, adjusting for inflation and the full sweep of the graft, have suggested figures running into the billions of dollars. Whatever the true number, it was enough to make Tweed, for a few years, one of the largest landowners in New York and a director of banks, a railroad, and a hotel.
The machinery of the theft was almost banal in its method and breathtaking in its volume. The Ring controlled the bodies that audited and paid the city’s bills, and they simply padded those bills — contractors and suppliers were instructed to inflate their charges enormously, kick most of the surplus back to the Ring, and keep a share for their silence. The new New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, became the monument to the scheme: a building budgeted at a few hundred thousand dollars that swallowed many millions, with thermometers, plastering, and furniture billed at sums that defied belief.
Tweed’s undoing came not from the police or the courts, which he largely owned, but from the press. The cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloried him relentlessly in Harper’s Weekly, rendering the rotund Boss in images so vivid that even the illiterate could understand them — Tweed reportedly complained less about the articles than about ‘them damned pictures.’ In July 1871 The New York Times, supplied with figures leaked from inside the comptroller’s office, published the Ring’s own accounts, laying the fraud out in columns of numbers the public could verify.
The exposure destroyed him. Tweed was arrested, tried, and convicted; he escaped from custody and fled the country, only to be recaptured in Spain — where, by a famous irony, officials are said to have identified him from one of Nast’s cartoons. He was returned to New York and died, broke and broken, in the Ludlow Street Jail in April 1878, in the very institution his own machine had once controlled.