Washington, comprising wholesale frauds on the public revenue, awakened lively disgust. In some cases the culprits were so near to President Grant that many persons found it difficult to avoid the suspicion that he was himself implicated, and never perhaps was his hold upon popular favour so slight as in the summer and autumn of 1876.
After the close of his presidency in the spring of 1877 Grant started on a journey round the world, accompanied by his wife and one son. He was received with distinguished honours in England and on the continent of Europe, whence he made his way to India, China and Japan. Later life. After his return to America in September 1880 he went back to his old home in Galena, Illinois. A faction among the managers of the Republican party attempted to secure his nomination for a third term as president, and in the convention at Chicago in June 1880 he received a vote exceeding 300 during 36 consecutive ballots. Nevertheless, his opponents made such effective use of the popular prejudice against third terms that the scheme was defeated, and Garfield was named in his stead. In August 1881 General Grant bought a house in the city of New York. His income was insufficient for the proper support of his family, and accordingly he had become partner in a banking house in which one of his sons was interested along with other persons. The name of the firm was Grant and Ward. The ex-president invested in it all his available property, but paid no attention to the management of the business. His facility in giving his confidence to unworthy people was now to be visited with dire calamity. In 1884 the firm became bankrupt, and it was discovered that two of the partners had been perpetrating systematic and gigantic frauds. This severe blow left General Grant penniless, just at the time when he was beginning to suffer acutely from the disease which finally caused his death. Down to this time he had never made any pretensions to literary skill or talent, but on being approached by the Century Magazine with a request for some articles he undertook the work in order to keep the wolf from the door. It proved a congenial task, and led to the writing of his Personal Memoirs, a frank, modest and charming book, which ranks among the best standard military biographies. The sales earned for the general and his family something like half a million dollars. The circumstances in which it was written made it an act of heroism comparable with any that Grant ever showed as a soldier. During most of the time he was suffering tortures from cancer in the throat, and it was only four days before his death that he finished the manuscript. In the spring of 1885 Congress passed a bill creating him a general on the retired list; and in the summer he was removed to a cottage at Mount M’Gregor, near Saratoga, where he passed the last five weeks of his life, and where he died on the 23rd of July 1885. His body was placed in a temporary tomb in Riverside Drive, in New York City, overlooking the Hudson river.[1]
Grant showed many admirable and lovable traits. There was a charming side to his trustful simplicity, which was at times almost like that of a sailor set ashore. He abounded in kindliness and generosity, and if there was anything especially difficult for him to endure, it was the sight of human suffering, as was shown on the night at Shiloh, where he lay out of doors in the icy rain rather than stay in a comfortable room where the surgeons were at work. His good sense was strong, as well as his sense of justice, and these qualities stood him in good service as president, especially in his triumphant fight against the greenback monster. Altogether, in spite of some shortcomings, Grant was a massive, noble and lovable personality, well fit to be remembered as one of the heroes of a great nation. (J. Fi.)
General Grant’s son, Frederick Dent Grant (b. 1850), graduated at the U.S. Military Academy in 1871, was aide-de-camp to General Philip Sheridan in 1873–1881, and resigned from the army in 1881, after having attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was U.S. minister to Austria in 1889–1893, and police commissioner of New York city in 1894–1898. He served as a brigadier-general of volunteers in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and then in the Philippines, becoming brigadier-general in the regular army in February 1901 and major-general in February 1906.
Bibliography.—Adam Badeau’s Military History of U. S. Grant (3 vols., New York, 1867–1881), and Grant in Peace (Hartford, 1887), are appreciative but lacking in discrimination. William Conant Church’s Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction (New York, 1897) is a good succinct account. Hamlin Garland’s Ulysses S. Grant, His Life and Character (New York, 1898) gives especial attention to the personal traits of Grant and abounds in anecdote. See also Grant’s Personal Memoirs (2 vols., New York, 1885–1886); J. G. Wilson’s Life and Public Services of U. S. Grant (New York, 1886); J. R. Young’s Around the World with General Grant (New York, 1880); Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1897); James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States (vols. iii.-vii., New York, 1896–1906); James K. Hosmer’s Appeal to Arms and Outcome of the Civil War (New York, 1907); John Eaton’s Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen (New York, 1907), and various works mentioned in the articles American Civil War, Wilderness Campaign, &c.
GRANT (from A.-Fr. graunter, O. Fr. greanter for creanter, popular Lat. creantare, for credentare, to entrust, Lat. credere, to believe, trust), originally permission, acknowledgment, hence the gift of privileges, rights, &c., specifically in law, the transfer of property by an instrument in writing, termed a deed of grant. According to the old rule of common law, the immediate freehold in corporeal hereditaments lay in livery (see Feoffment), whereas incorporeal hereditaments, such as a reversion, remainder, advowson, &c., lay in grant, that is, passed by the delivery of the deed of conveyance or grant without further ceremony. The distinction between property lying in livery and in grant is now abolished, the Real Property Act 1845 providing that all corporeal tenements and hereditaments shall be transferable as well by grant as by livery (see Conveyancing). A grant of personal property is properly termed an assignment or bill of sale.
GRANTH, the holy scriptures of the Sikhs, containing the spiritual and moral teaching of Sikhism (q.v.). The book is called the Adi Granth Sahib by the Sikhs as a title of respect, because it is believed by them to be an embodiment of the gurus. The title is generally applied to the volume compiled by the fifth guru Arjan, which contains the compositions of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion; of his successors, Guru Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das and Arjan; hymns of the Hindu bhagats or saints, Jaidev, Namdev, Trilochan, Sain, Ramanand, Kabir, Rai Das, Pipa, Bhikhan, Beni, Parmanand Das, Sur Das, Sadhna and Dhanna Jat; verses of the Mahommedan saint called Farid; and panegyrics of the gurus by bards who either attended them or admired their characters. The compositions of the ninth guru, Teg Bahadur, were subsequently added to the Adi Granth by Guru Govind Singh. One recension of the sacred volume preserved at Mangat in the Gujrat district contains a hymn composed by Mira Bai, queen of Chitor. The Adi Granth contains passages of great picturesqueness and beauty. The original copy is said to be in Kartarpur in the Jullundur district, but the chief copy in use is now in the Har Mandar or Golden Temple at Amritsar, where it is daily read aloud by the attendant Granthis or scripture readers.
There is also a second Granth which was compiled by the Sikhs in 1734, and popularly known as the Granth of the tenth Guru, but it has not the same authority as the Adi Granth. It contains Guru Govind Singh’s Jāpji, the Akāl Ustit or Praise of the Creator, thirty-three sawaias (quatrains containing some of the main tenets of the guru and strong reprobation of idolatry and hypocrisy), and the Vachitar Natak or wonderful drama, in which the guru gives an account of his parentage, divine mission and the battles in which he was engaged. Then come three abridged translations by different hands of the Devi Mahatamya,
- ↑ The permanent tomb is of white granite and white marble and is 150 ft. high with a circular cupola topping a square building 90 ft. on the side and 72 ft. high; the sarcophagus, in the centre of the building, is of red Wisconsin porphyry. The cornerstone was laid by President Harrison in 1892, and the tomb was dedicated on the 27th of April 1897 with a splendid parade and addresses by President McKinley and General Horace Porter, president of the Grant Monument Association, which from 90,000 contributions raised the funds for the tomb.
