About General Grant’s memoirs

In Mark Twain’s autobiography, he wrote about General Grant’s financial situation and negotiations around publishing Grant’s memoirs. Apparently, Grant was his own worst enemy on financial matters:

[Grant] was to visit Hartford from Boston and I was one of the committee sent to Boston to bring him down here. I was also appointed to introduce him to the Hartford people when the population and the soldiers should pass in review before him. On our way from Boston in the palace car I fell to talking with Grant’s eldest son, Colonel Fred Grant, whom I knew very well, and it gradually came out that the General, so far from being a rich man, as was commonly supposed, had not even income enough to enable him to live as respectably as a third-rate physician.

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Later still, the firm of Grant and Ward, brokers and stock-dealers, was established at number 2, Wall street, New York City.

This firm consisted of General Grant’s sons and a brisk young man by the name of Ferdinand Ward. The General was also in some way a partner, but did not take any active part in the business of the house.

In a little time the business had grown to such proportions that it was apparently not only profitable but it was prodigiously so.

The truth was, however, that Ward was robbing all the Grants and everybody else that he could get his hands on and the firm was not making a penny.

The General was unsuspicious, and supposed that he was making a vast deal of money, whereas indeed he was simply losing such as he had, for Ward was getting it.

About the 5th of May, I think it was, 1884, the crash came and the several Grant families found themselves absolutely penniless.

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I went straight to General Grant’s house next morning and told him what I had heard. He said it was all true.

I said I had foreseen a fortune in such a book when I had tried in 1881 to get him to write it; that the fortune was just as sure to fall now. I asked him who was to publish the book, and he said doubtless the Century Company.

I asked him if the contract had been drawn and signed?

He said it had been drawn in the rough but not signed yet.

I said I had had a long and painful experience in book making and publishing and that if there would be no impropriety in his showing me the rough contract I believed I might be useful to him.
He said there was no objection whatever to my seeing the contract, since it had proceeded no further than a mere consideration of its details without promises given or received on either side. He added that he supposed that the Century offer was fair and right and that he had been expecting to accept it and conclude the bargain or contract.

He read the rough draft aloud and I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.

…

The General began to perceive from these various views that he had narrowly escaped making a very bad bargain for his book and now he began to incline toward me for the reason, no doubt, that I had been the accidental cause of stopping that bad bargain.

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In the course of one of my business talks with General Grant he asked me if I felt sure I could sell 25,000 copies of his book and he asked the question in such a way that I suspected that the Century people had intimated that that was about the number of the books that they thought ought to sell. […]

I replied that the best way for a man to express an opinion in such a case was to put it in money—therefore, I would make this offer: if he would give me the book I would advance him the sum of $25,000 on each volume the moment the manuscript was placed in my hands, and if I never got the $50,000 back again, out of the future copyrights due, I would never ask him to return any part of the money to me.

The suggestion seemed to distress him. He said he could not think of taking in advance any sum of money large or small which the publisher would not be absolutely sure of getting back again. Some time afterwards when the contract was being drawn and the question was whether it should be 20 per cent royalty or 70 per cent of the profits, he inquired which of the two propositions would be the best all round. I sent Webster to tell him that the 20 per cent royalty would be the best for him, for the reason that it was the surest, the simplest, the easiest to keep track of, and, better still, would pay him a trifle more, no doubt, than with the other plan.

He thought the matter over and then said in substance that by the 20 per cent plan he would be sure to make, while the publisher might possibly lose: therefore, he would not have the royalty plan, but the 70-per-cent-profit plan; since if there were profits he could not then get them all but the publisher would be sure to get 30 per cent of it.

This was just like General Grant. It was absolutely impossible for him to entertain for a moment any proposition which might prosper him at the risk of any other man.