Autobiography of Mark Twain (18 page)

The committee in whose hands the Legislature had placed the matter consisted of Mr. Coit, a railroad man, of New London, a modest, sensible, honorable, worthy gentleman, who while wholly unacquainted with art and confessing it, was willing and anxious to do his duty in the matter. Another committeeman was an innocent ass by the name of Barnard, who knew nothing about art and in fact about nothing else, and if he had a mind was not able to make it up on any question. As for any sense of duty, that feature was totally lacking in him—he had no notion of it whatever. The third and last committeeman was the reigning Governor of the state, Waller, a smooth-tongued liar and moral coward.

Gerhardt designed and made a clay Nathan Hale and offered it for competition.

A salaried artist of Mr. Batterson, a stone cutter, designed a figure and placed it in competition, and so also did Mr. Woods, an elderly man who was sexton of Mrs. Colt’s private church.

Woods had some talent but no genius and no instruction in art. The stone cutter’s man had the experience and the practice that comes from continually repeating the same forms on hideous tombstones—robust prize-fighting angels, mainly.

The figure and pedestal made by Gerhardt were worthy of a less stingy price than the Legislature had offered, decenter companionship in the competition and a cleaner and less stupid committee.

In the opinion of William C. Prime and Charles D. Warner, Gerhardt’s was a very fine work of art and these men would not have hesitated to award the contract to him. The Governor looked at the three models and said that as far as he could see Gerhardt’s was altogether the preferable design. Mr. Coit said the same. But it was found impossible to get the aged Barnard to come to look at Gerhardt’s model. He offered among other excuses that he didn’t like to give a statue to a man who still had his reputation to make—that the statue ought to be made by an artist of established reputation. When asked what artist of established reputation would make a statue for $5,000 he was not able to reply. It was difficult for some time to find out what the real reason was for this old man’s delay, but it finally came out that Mrs. Colt’s money and influence were at the bottom of it. Mrs. Colt was anxious to throw that statue into the hands
of her sexton in some way or other. She wrote a letter to the Governor, in which she argued the claims of her sexton, and it presently became quite manifest that the Governor found himself in an uncomfortable position, for the reason that he had characterized the sexton’s attempt as exceedingly poor and crude, and had also stated quite distinctly that of the three models he much preferred Gerhardt’s and was ready to vote in that way.

This incredible puppy actually described Gerhardt’s design to the sexton and advised him to make a new design for competition—which he did; and he used Gerhardt’s design in it! The Governor had no more sense than to tell Gerhardt that he had done this thing. Taking the whole thing round it has been the most comical competition for a statue the country has ever seen. It was so ludicrous and so paltry—in every way contemptible—that I tried to get Gerhardt to retire from the competition and make a group for me to be called the Statue Committee to present portraits of these cattle and mousers over a clay image. I said I would write a history of the Nathan Hale committee to go with the statue and I believed he could put it in terra cotta and make some money out of it. But he did not wish to degrade his art in gratifying his personal spite and he declined to do it.

It is customary everywhere else, I believe, for such a committee to specify what is the latest date for the offering of designs and also a date when a judgment on them shall be rendered, but this committee made no limit—at least in writing. Their policy evidently was to give Mrs. Colt’s sexton time enough to get up a satisfactory image—no matter how long that might take—and then give him the contract.

Waller failed to be reelected Governor, but was appointed Consul-General to London and sailed on the 10th of May with the Nathan Hale statue still undecided, although, as he had a personal favor to ask of a friend of Gerhardt’s, just before sailing he said “Grant me the favor and I will pledge my word that the Nathan Hale business shall be settled before I sail.”

Gerhardt kept his clay image wet and waiting three or four months and then he let it crumble to pieces because the prospects of the design seemed to be as far away as ever.

About General Grant’s Memoirs

1885. (Spring.)

I want to set down somewhat of a history of General Grant’s memoirs.

By way of preface I will make a remark or two indirectly connected therewith.

During the Garfield campaign General Grant threw the whole weight of his influence and endeavor toward the triumph of the Republican Party. He made a progress through many of the states, chiefly the doubtful ones, and this progress was a daily and nightly ovation as long as it lasted. He was received everywhere by prodigious multitudes of enthusiastic people and to strain the facts a little one might almost tell what part of the country the General was in for the moment by the red reflections on the sky caused by the torch processions and fireworks.

He 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.

Colonel Grant told me that the General left the White House at the end of his second term a poor man, and I think he said he was in debt but I am not positively sure. (Said he was in debt $45,000, at the end of
one
of his terms.) Friends had given the General a couple of dwelling houses but he was not able to keep them or live in either of them. This was all so shameful and such a reproach to Congress that I proposed to take the General’s straitened circumstances as my text in introducing him to the people of Hartford.

I knew that if this nation, which was rising up daily to do its chief citizen unparalleled honor, had it in its power by its vote to decide the matter, that it would turn his poverty into immeasurable wealth, in an instant. Therefore, the reproach lay not with the people but with their political representatives in Congress and my speech could be no insult to the people.

I clove to my plan, and, in introducing the General, I referred to the dignities and emoluments lavished upon the Duke of Wellington by England and contrasted with that conduct our far finer and higher method toward the savior of our country: to wit—the simple carrying him in our hearts without burdening him with anything to live on.

In his reply, the General, of course, said that this country had more than sufficiently rewarded him and that he was well satisfied.

He could not have said anything else, necessarily.

A few months later I could not have made such a speech, for by that time certain wealthy citizens had privately made up a purse of a quarter of a million dollars for the General, and had invested it in such a way that he could not be deprived of it either by his own want of wisdom or the rascality of other people.

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.

Ward had even captured the interest due on the quarter of a million dollars of the Grant fund, which interest had fallen due only a day or two before the failure.

General Grant told me that that month, for the
first time in his life
, he had paid his domestic bills with
checks
. They came back upon his hands dishonored. He told me that Ward had spared
no one connected with the Grant name however remote—that he had taken all that the General could scrape together and $45,000 that the General had borrowed on his wife’s dwelling house in New York; that he had taken $65,000—the sum for which Mrs. Grant had sold, recently, one of the houses which had been presented to the General; that he had taken $7,000, which some poverty-stricken nieces of his in the West had recently received by bequest, and which was all the money they had in the world—that, in a word, Ward had utterly stripped everybody connected with the Grant family.

It was necessary that something be immediately done toward getting bread.

The bill to restore to General Grant the title and emoluments of a full General in the army, on the retired list, had been lagging for a long time in Congress—in the characteristic, contemptible and stingy congressional fashion. No relief was to be looked for from that source, mainly because Congress chose to avenge on General Grant the veto of the Fitz-John Porter Bill by President Arthur.

The editors of the Century Magazine some months before conceived the excellent idea of getting the surviving heroes of the late Civil War, on both sides, to write out their personal reminiscences of the war and publish them now in the magazine. But the happy project had come to grief, for the reason that some of these heroes were quite willing to write out these things only under one condition that they insisted on as essential. They refused to write a line unless the leading actor of the war should also write.
*
All persuasions and arguments failed on General Grant. He would
not
write; so, the scheme fell through.

Now, however, the complexion of things had changed and General Grant was without bread. [Not figurative, but actual.]

The Century people went to him once more and now he assented eagerly. A great series of war articles was immediately advertised by the Century publishers.

I knew nothing of all this, although I had been a number of times to the General’s house to pass half an hour talking and smoking a cigar.

However, I was reading one night in Chickering Hall early in November, 1884, and as my wife and I were leaving the building we stumbled over Mr. Gilder, the editor of the Century, and went home with him to a late supper at his house. We were there an hour or two and in the course of the conversation Gilder said that General Grant had written three war articles for the Century and was going to write a fourth. I pricked up my ears. Gilder went on to describe how eagerly General Grant had entertained the proposition to write when it had last been put to him and how poor he evidently was and how eager to make some trifle of bread and butter money and how the handing him a check for $500 for the first article had manifestly gladdened his heart and lifted from it a mighty burden.

The thing which astounded me was, that, admirable man as Gilder certainly is, and with a heart which is in the right place, it had never seemed to occur to him that to offer General Grant $500 for a magazine article was not only the monumental insult of the nineteenth century, but of all centuries. He ought to have known that if he had given General Grant a check for $10,000 the sum would still have been trivial; that if he had paid him $20,000 for
a single article the sum would still have been inadequate; that if he had paid him $30,000 for a single magazine war article it still could not be called paid for; that if he had given him $40,000 for a single magazine article he would still be in General Grant’s debt. Gilder went on to say that it had been impossible, months before, to get General Grant to write a single line, but that now that he had once got started it was going to be as impossible to stop him again; that, in fact, General Grant had set out deliberately to write his memoirs in full and to publish them in book form.

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.