Thomas Nast and Mark Twain idolized Ulysses Grant because he was the Union General who finally ended Civil War.  Both artists corresponded with Grant.  Nast even visited Grant in the White House and wrote home to tell his wife about it.  Grant and his wife dined several times with the Nast’s at their home in Morristown, New Jersey, after Grant left the White House.

 

Mark Twain also visited Nast’s home on Thanksgiving Eve, 1885.  Twain gave a presentation at the Morristown Lyceum and dined with the Nast’s that evening.  They invited Twain to spend the night.   The ticking clocks in the Nast home irritated him and he couldn’t go to sleep. He got up in the middle of the night and turned all the clocks off.  In the morning when Mrs. Nast questioned Twain about it, he informed her “that the clocks had needed a rest.”

 

Ulysses Grant and Thomas Nast lost all their savings in the Grant  & Ward investment scandal in 1864.  The firm composed of Ulysses S. Grant Jr. (one of the former president’s sons) and Ferdinand Ward, whom many considered a financial genius.   It came as a great shock  when Grant & Ward failed. The firm had been using Grant’s name to inspire confidence, but it had been fraudulent from the beginning.  Ward had made a habit of using new investor’s money to cover the dividends paid to old investors. After the scandal Mark Twain published Ulysses Grant’s memoirs which prevented the Grant family from living in poverty after the former president died of throat cancer.