The Treasury Department is printing up another new $50 bill with yet another new picture of me on it. This one has special colors hidden in it, and the ink changes its appearance depending on how you look at it -- just like a battlefield.
I've always found it odd that they put my face on money, since I never had a head for it. My prospects as a merchant were so poor that my father forced me into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point so that I might one day have an occupation.
When I was 8, the old man sent me to buy a neighbor's horse. When I got to the neighbor's house, I said: "Papa says I may offer you $20 for the colt, but if you won't take that, to offer you $22.50, and if you won't take that, to give you $25." You don't have to be Commodore Vanderbilt to figure out what I paid. After that, I quit negotiating and started demanding unconditional surrender instead.
I failed in every business I tried except slaughter. When I was stationed at Fort Vancouver during the Gold Rush, I had the idea of shipping ice to San Francisco, where a chronic ice shortage was compelling the citizenry to drink their whiskey neat. But our boat hit some bad winds in Puget Sound, and we delivered a cargo of water, which they already had in abundance.
I drank myself out of the service after that, and went home to farm the land my father-in-law gave me. All I managed to grow was children. By the summer of '57, the economy had crashed, and I was down to cutting wood and selling it on a street corner in St. Louis. I wore my overcoat from the Mexican War to solicit a little respect. Or, failing that, sympathy.
I was standing there one September's day when who should come along but Sherman. He had been three years ahead of me at West Point. It was Sherman who first saw my name on the roster of new students and nicknamed me "Sam," on account of my initials -- you know, Ulysses S., Uncle Sam. That was about 18 years before.
"Hello, Sam," he says, and he looks me over with those dark, deep- set eyes. "How's it going for you?"
"Well, I'm busy fighting poverty, Cump," I said, which is what we called him -- it was short for Tecumseh, his middle name. "How about you?" Sherman had quit the army in '50 and ended up in banking in California.
"I'm a dead cock in the pit, Sam," he said, shaking his twitchy, gaunt head. "The crash wiped us clean."
We stood there, avoiding each other's gazes as only failures can, until he walked on. Eight years later, with him at my side, I led the greatest army the world had ever known.
When I was president, money proved to be a problem. Fisk and Gould, the speculators, talked me into buying gold to make the dollar cheap. When I tried to break them on "Black Friday," in '69, they were out before the market turned, like kids winning a game of hot potato. Later in my presidency, there were incessant demands for "sound money." When the Northern Pacific railroad failed and the stock market crashed again, Commodore Vanderbilt and his banking friends said they needed some "sound money" to save themselves, and I told them they could have it. Then the farmers said they needed some of their own "sound money" to save their selves, and I told them that was inflationary. Let that be a lesson to other presidents: Money gets sounder the higher up the chain it goes.
After I retired, my boy, Buck, went into the brokerage business with a fellow named Ferdinand Ward. Buck proved as naive as I was -- Ward swindled us for all we had and skipped town. Once I had lost everything, I turned to the only capital I had left -- the story of my life. I took up writing my "Personal Memoirs" in order to leave Mrs. Grant some money. It sold 300,000 copies -- outpacing the Bible. Just like the Bible, it had a compelling leading character.
I suppose my picture is on the $50 bill to celebrate my victory over Bobby Lee, but I suspect there's another reason -- to remind you that having money, or even being on money, doesn't mean knowing what to do with it. Next time you hold a fifty, look me in the eye and think about it.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
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