Ulysses S. Grant

Grant's followers planned to nominate him for a third presidential term in 1876, but the leaders of the Republican National Convention opposed his renomination. They named Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio as the party's standard-bearer, and he won the election.

Grant left office in March 1877, with a few thousand dollars saved and a desire to see the world. On May 17 he sailed with his family for Liverpool, England, on the first leg of a journey around the world. Everywhere he was well received, not as the former president of the United States, but as the hero of the Civil War. He met and talked with many foreign leaders. John Russell Young's Around the World With General Grant (1879) provides an account of some of Grant's impressions and conversations.

After two years of travel, Grant returned home. He was still interested in a third term as president, but at the convention in 1880 the nomination went to James A. Garfield. Grant's political career was at an end.

Grant's last years were bitter ones. He had given up an assured income for life when he resigned from the army to become president. For a year after returning to the United States, his family lived on the income from a $250,000 fund collected for him by friends. When the securities in which the fund was invested failed, Grant was once again without financial resources.

Not until 1885 did Congress vote to restore Grant's rank of full general with an appropriate salary. By that time he was fatally ill. He was moved to Mount McGregor, near Saratoga, New York, in an effort to restore his health. There he began to write his recollections of the war years, the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885-1886). They were completed only a week before he died of cancer of the throat. Because in the last months of his life he was unable to speak, the memoirs were in large part written out in his own hand.

The book was a resounding success. Grant focused on the Civil War, the period of his greatest glory, yet he did not write to glorify or justify himself. He attempted to tell what really happened, admitting his mistakes and sharing credit with others. His book remains one of the great war commentaries of all time.

Grant died at Mount McGregor on July 23, 1885. His body eventually found its last resting place in the great mausoleum known as Grant's Tomb, overlooking the Hudson River in New York City.

Just before his death, Grant summed up his career in a note to his doctor: “It seems that man's destiny in this world is quite as much a mystery as it is likely to be in the next. I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for; yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officer for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for political life; yet I was twice President of the United States. If anyone ... suggested the idea of my becoming an author ... I was not sure whether they were making sport of me or not. I have now written a book which is in the hands of the manufacturers.”