Grant Cottage: The General's Last Campaign

Mount McGregor, in the hills above Saratoga Springs, is where Ulysses S. Grant came in the summer of eighteen eighty-five to finish his memoirs and die.

By then the former general and two-term president was sixty-two years old and broke. A fraudulent investment firm had collapsed, wiping out his savings. He was also dying of throat cancer, a disease he had hidden from the public as long as possible, brought on by decades of cigar smoking. His friend Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs and pay a royalty far above standard rates, seventy percent of net profits, to provide for his family after he was gone. Grant accepted and began writing.

On June sixteenth, eighteen eighty-five, his doctors moved him from New York City to a wooden cottage on Mount McGregor, believing the cool mountain air might ease his suffering. He arrived barely able to speak, communicating increasingly by handwritten notes. And he wrote. He wrote through the pain, wearing a wool scarf around his throat even in summer heat, sustained by cocaine toothache drops applied to his throat and by the iron will that had carried him through Cold Harbor and the Wilderness.

Grant finished his Personal Memoirs on July eighteenth, eighteen eighty-five. He died five days later, on July twenty-third, in the small bedroom upstairs. The memoirs sold more than three hundred thousand sets and earned his family nearly half a million dollars.

Mark Twain later called it one of the most remarkable literary achievements he had encountered: clear, unadorned, precise, the voice of a man who had learned economy of means on a battlefield. Edmund Wilson agreed, placing it among the great American prose works of the nineteenth century.

The cottage stands essentially unchanged. The chair where Grant sat on the porch in his final weeks, the medicine bottles, the handwritten notes, all still there. A quiet place on a quiet mountain where one of the great American lives ended at a writing table.