In the summer of 1884, Grant’s omnipresent cigars caught up with him. The taciturn general bit into a peach, swallowed, and screamed in pain. He had throat cancer and was dying, but he retained the fierce determination that had seen him through the Civil War. Grant made his last year his finest hour since the war’s conclusion. He set out to write his memoirs—The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant—in order to provide for his family after he died. With the help of Mark Twain, who published them, he did so. His Memoirs—whose conclusion begins, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the
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