“What I’ve heard about that firm wouldn’t justify me in lending it a dime,” Vanderbilt told him.
Grant’s friend Mark Twain published Grant’s memoirs just months after the former president’s death. Vanderbilt, richest man in the world, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Grant listened intently, then paid a visit to another friend- William H. A panic, Ward told him, would most likely follow. On May 4, Ward told Grant that the Marine National Bank was on the verge of collapse, and unless it received a one-day cash infusion of $150,000, Grant and Ward would be wiped out, as most of their investments were tied up with the bank. Ferdinand Ward, his dashing and smooth-talking partner-he was only 33 but known as the “Young Napoleon of Wall Street”-had been running a Ponzi scheme, soliciting investments from Grant’s wealthy friends, speculating with the funds, and then cooking the books to cover his losses. In truth, Grant had little understanding of finance, and by May 1884, he had seen yet another failure, this one spectacular and publicized in newspapers across the country. In New York, in the spring of 1884, things were about to get worse.Īfter putting up $100,000 in securities, Grant became a new partner, along with Buck, in the investment firm of Grant and Ward. Their son Buck had to send them $60,000 so they could continue on with their travels. Before the Civil War he’d failed at both farming and the leather business, and on the two-year, round-the-world tour he and Julia took after his presidency, they ran out of money when Grant miscalculated their needs. Morgan raised money to help Grant and his wife, Julia, make a home on East 66th Street in Manhattan, and after two decades at war and in politics, the Ohio-born son of a tanner approached his 60s aspiring to join the circles of the elite industrialists and financiers of America’s Gilded Age.īut the Union’s preeminent Civil War hero had never been good at financial matters. Grant settled in New York, where the most famous man in America was determined to make a fortune in investment banking. Photo: Library of CongressĪfter serving two terms as president, Ulysses S. Grant working on his memoirs just weeks before his death in 1885.
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