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There have been a few unsuccessful ex-presidents. Thomas Jefferson went heavily into debt, and Monticello was sold off to pay off the banks. Jimmy Carter lost his peanut farm due to mismanagement of the blind trust. However, the worst case scenario was Ulysses S. Grant. He was hornswoggled by a con man named Ferdinand Ward. Grant’s son talked him into forming an investment firm with Ward. The trouble was that Ward was pocketing all of the money, and all of the investors started wondering where their profits were. When Ward was charged with fraud, Grant vowed to pay back all of the stolen money. He had to sell all of his medals and all of the property he owned, and it left him destitute.

Enter the hero, Mark Twain! Grant had agreed to sell his memoirs to another publishing company, but the amount agreed upon was a pittance. Mark Twain offered to publish Grant’s memoirs, and gave him a lucrative royalty deal. It was at this time that Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer. (Curse those cigars!) It became a race against time for Grant to write out his memoirs. (There were reports that Mark Twain acted as a script doctor to make the prose flow more evenly.) Grant finished his memoir a few days before he died in 1885. The book became a best seller, and brought in about a half-million dollars for the Grant family.

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