Smithsonian.com

It was, by all accounts, a glorious Wednesday morning on June 15, 1904, and the men of Kleindeutschland—Little Germany, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side–were on their way to work. Just after 9 o’clock, a group from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6^th Street, mostly women and children, boarded the General Slocum for their annual end-of-school outing. Bounding aboard what was billed as the “largest and most splendid excursion steamer in New York,” the children, dressed in their Sunday school outfits, shouted and waved flags as the adults followed, carrying picnic baskets for what was to be a long day away.

A German band played on deck while the children romped and the adults sang along, waiting to depart. Just before 10 o’clock, the lines were cast off, a bell rang in the engine room, and a deck hand reported to Captain William Van Schaick that nearly a thousand tickets had been collected at the plank. That number didn’t include the 300 children under the age of 10, who didn’t require tickets. Including crew and catering staff, there were about 1,350 aboard the General Slocum as it steamed up the East River at 15 knots toward Long Island Sound, headed for Locust Grove, a picnic ground on Long Island’s North Shore, about two hours away.

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Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one point creating such a violent conflagration that his servants worried he would burn the whole house down. By the time he had finished, a vast pile of confidential papers, including 58 years’ worth of diaries that recorded every detail of a most scandalous career, had been turned to ash. Thus the shadowy figure whom the press dubbed “the Mystery Man of Europe” ensured that his long life would remain, for the most part, an impenetrable enigma.

Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer—a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.

In his prime, Zaharoff was more than a match for the notorious Aleister Crowley in any contest to be dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World.  Still remembered as the inventor of the Systeme Zaharoff—a morally bankrupt sales technique that involved a single unscrupulous arms dealer selling to both parties in a conflict he has helped to provoke—he made a fortune working as a super-salesman for Vickers, the greatest of all British private arms firms, whom he served for 30 years as “our General Representative abroad.” He expressed no objection to, and indeed seemed rather to enjoy, being referred to as “the Armaments King.”

Zaharoff’s youth remains shrouded in mystery and rumor, much of it put about by Zedzed himself. He was born in the Turkish town of Mughla, the son of a Greek importer of attar of roses, and soon proved to be an astonishing linguist—he would later be described as the master of 10 languages. At some point, it is supposed, the family moved briefly to Odessa, on Russia’s Black Sea coast, where they Russified their name. But remarkably little proper documentation survives from this or any other period of Zaharoff’s career. As one early biographer, the Austrian Robert Neumann, put it:

You ask for his birth certificate. Alas! a fire destroyed the church registers. You search for a document concerning him in the archives of the Vienna War Office. The folder is there, but it is empty; the document has vanished…. He buys a château in France and—how does the story of the editor of the Documents politiques go?—”Sir Basil Zaharoff at once buys up all the picture postcards… which show the château, and strictly prohibits any more photographs being taken.”

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Ulysses S. Grant was fresh out of West Point when he reported for duty with the Army’s 4th Infantry Regiment at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, in 1844. The 21-year-old second lieutenant found his work as a quartermaster, managing equipment and supplies, to be dull. He was eager to escape the monotony of peacetime, and when his West Point roommate Frederick T. Dent invited him to his family home just ten miles from the barracks, Grant jumped at the opportunity. It was at Dent’s White Haven home that Grant first laid eyes on the woman of his dreams.

Young and lean, Grant was a promising officer from the prestigious military academy in New York. Julia Dent was plain, squat and cross-eyed, and she didn’t have much in the way of a formal education. But she was warm and self-aware, and with young single women few and far between west of the Mississippi, Grant became enamored of her. Before long, he was visiting Julia daily, and just weeks into their courtship, he had marriage on his mind.

The time they spent together in Missouri, riding horses and reading poetry to each other, cemented Grant’s commitment to the teenage girl. At one point her pet canary died, and Grant crafted a small yellow coffin and summoned eight fellow officers for an avian funeral service. But Grant had been raised in a Northern household that looked down on slave owners, and Julia’s father had purchased his eldest daughter her own personal slave, known as “Black Julia.” Still, he wanted to be around the woman he had fallen for.

By 1844, tensions between the United States and Mexico over the territory of Texas were heating up, and Grant was soon serving under General Zachary Taylor, the future U.S. president, on the front lines in Mexico. But before he headed south, he pulled off his West Point ring and handed it to Julia, securing their engagement. They held this in secret, as Julia’s father did not approve of his daughter marrying a military man, especially a disapproving one from the North. Julia gave the departing soldier a lock of her hair in return.

As soon as he was away, Grant began writing love letters to Julia Dent. They portray a tender, sensitive and insecure young man, overly concerned that his fiancée did not share the intensity of his longing for her. She did not write as frequently as he did, causing him great despair, but when she did compose and send letters, Grant would read them over and over.

“My Dear Julia,” he wrote. “You can have but little idea of the influence you have over me Julia, even while so far away…and thus it is absent or present I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.”

One letter arrived in return with two dried flowers inside, but when Grant opened it the petals scattered in the wind. He searched the barren Mexican sands for even a single petal, but in vain. “Before I seal this I will pick a wild flower off of the Bank of the Rio Grande and send you,” he wrote. Later, from Matamoras, he wrote, “You say in your letter I must not grow tired of hearing you say how much you love me! Indeed dear Julia nothing you can say sounds sweeter…. When I lay down I think of Julia until I fall asleep hoping that before I wake I may see her in my dreams.”

Grant admitted to her that the time between battles was burdensome. “I have the Blues all the time,” he wrote. She had moved to St. Louis with her younger sister, Nell, and attended school, and her social life had become far more active. Grant assumed the worst. “I believe you are carrying on a flirtation with someone, as you threaten of doing,” he wrote her. In truth, it was Nell who had brought the young men of St. Louis into Julia’s orbit. But none of them seemed interested in the plump, cross-eyed woman who was the focus of Grant’s obsession.

In July of 1848, after they had been apart for four years, Grant’s regiment returned to the United States, and he took leave so that he might make wedding arrangements in St. Louis. By then, Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, had fallen on hard times, which Julia attributed to his being “most kind and indulgent” toward the slaves he owned. (The fact of the matter is that Dent had simply dragged his family into poverty by mismanaging his farm.) Suddenly, he could overlook his future son-in-law’s Northern arrogance and he blessed his daughter’s choice of him as husband. Grant’s father refused to attend their August wedding, objecting not to Julia, but to her family’s owning slaves.

After the Grants were married in August 1848, Ulysses was back in the Army. Julia gave birth to Frederick Dent Grant in May of 1850, and Ulysses Simpson Grant followed while his father was dispatched to the West Coast for several years. The separation was agonizing for Grant, and he resumed his drinking. He resigned from the Army in 1854, and while some historians have suggested that in lieu of a court-martial for being intoxicated while off-duty, he may have been given the choice to resign, it didn’t matter: The young officer was now free to return East to his wife and boys, and it was in St. Louis that he built a log cabin and attempted to live off the land with his family.

He named their home “Hardscrabble,” and it fit; Grant’s cleared trees from the land by himself, then peddled firewood on the streets of St. Louis.  At one point, he purchased a slave from Julia’s brother Fred, his old West Point roommate.  Yet without explanation, when he was in debt and barely able to put food on his family’s table, Grant appeared in court on March 20, 1859, and emancipated his slave rather than selling him.

With four children now, Grant became ill with malaria, and he couldn’t run his farm; he had to give up Hardscrabble and move in with Julia’s parents in White Haven. Once he recovered he took a job collecting rents for a real estate firm in St. Louis, but he couldn’t earn enough money. By 1860, Grant was out of options, and he asked his father for help. He was offered a job in the family leather business, working under his two younger brothers. Earning $600 a year, he could go a long way toward getting his family out of debt, so he moved Julia and the children to Illinois.

Ulysses S. Grant was 38 and living a settled life with his family when Southerners fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861.  His father-in-law tried to persuade him to fight for the Confederacy, without luck. (Even Dent’s own West Point son chose to support the Union.) Grant helped organize volunteers, but it wasn’t long before, by dint of his Army experience, he took command of the Illinois troops. This time around, he found that military life suited his temperament, and he was promoted to brigadier general. He vowed never to return to the leather store, and with renewed energy and confidence he led 15,000 troops into battle at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, and trapped the Confederates inside the fort. His message of “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender” earned him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant.” President Abraham Lincoln promoted him to major general.

Yet the monotony between battles once again began to wear on Grant, and again he began to drink. He concluded that he was a better man and a better commander when he was around Julia, and so he sent for her. She would leave the children with relatives to travel to his encampments, at times at considerable risk, and over the course of the Civil War she would stay with him during campaigns at Memphis, Vicksburg, Nashville and Virginia. Her presence lifted her husband’s spirits and buoyed his confidence; in 1864, when Lincoln appointed Grant commander of the Union armies, the president sent for Julia to join her husband, aware of the positive effect she had on him.

Three years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, Grant was elected president of the United States. Julia worried that her strabismus—the condition that gave her her cross-eyed appearance—might be an embarrassment to her husband. She considered surgery, but, as she wrote in her memoirs, “I never had the courage to consent, but now that my husband had become so famous I really thought it behooved me to try to look as well as possible.”

When the surgeon told her that it was “too late” to correct the condition, she expressed her regret to her husband. “What in the world put such a thought in your head, Julia?” he asked.

“Why, you are getting to be such a great man, and I am such a plain little wife,” she replied. “I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain.”

Grant pulled her close. “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes?” he asked. “I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”

Julia Grant never considered surgery again. But she did take care to pose for portraits in profile, so her crossed eyes would not appear in photographs.

After Grant’s tumultuous two terms in the White House, he and Julia traveled the world, and were welcomed by great crowds in Ireland, Egypt, China and Russia. They spent most of their savings on the trip, and when they returned to New York an investment banking firm defrauded Grant of his remaining funds, and he was forced to sell his Civil War mementos to cover debts.

In 1884, Grant learned that he had throat cancer and set about writing his memoirs. When Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) learned of Grant’s intent, he brokered a publishing deal that guaranteed higher-than-standard royalties and an aggressive marketing plan. Julia remained by her husband’s side as he finished his writing only days before he died, on July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor in upstate New York.

Grant’s Memoirs, published shortly thereafter, were critically acclaimed and commercially successful. The book’s sales left Julia with enough wealth to live out the rest of her life in comfort. After she died, in Washington in 1902, her body was laid to rest in a sarcophagus beside her beloved husband’s in New York.

Sources:

Books: Julia Dent Grant, The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, Putnam’s, 1975. Ulysses S. Grant, Mary D. McFeely, William S. McFeely, Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant/Selected Letters, 1839-1965, Library of America, 1990.  Geoffrey Perret, Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, Modern Library, 1998. Edward G. Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man, First DeCapo Press, 2007. Kate Havelin, Ulysses S. Grant, Lerner Publications Company, 2004. Patricia Cameron, Unconditional Surrender: The Romance of Julia and Ulysses S. Grant, BookSurge Publishing, 2010.

Articles: “Julia Dent Grant,” Marie Kelsey, http://faculty.css.edu/mkelsey/usgrant/julia.html

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”

That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements.

The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost. One version of the story holds that it was so terrible that the 13th Earl’s heir flatly refused to have it revealed to him. Yet the mystery of Glamis (pronounced “Glarms”) remains, kept alive by its association with royalty (the heir was grandfather to Elizabeth II) and by the fact that at least some members of the Bowes-Lyon family insisted it was real.

Glamis Castle is mentioned by Shakespeare—Macbeth, that most cursed of characters, was Thane of Glamis—and in 1034 the Scottish King Malcolm II died there, perhaps murdered. But the present castle was constructed only in the 15th century, around a central tower whose walls are, in places, 16 feet thick. Glamis has been the family seat of the Strathmore Earls since then, but by the late 18th century it lay largely empty, its owners preferring to live somewhere less drafty, less isolated and less melancholy.

In their absence, Glamis was left in the care of a factor, or estate manager, and it was to this factor that a young Walter Scott applied in 1790 to spend a night in one of its rooms. Scott became the first of several writers to note the castle’s oppressive atmosphere. “I must own,” he wrote in an account published in 1830, “as I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living and somewhat too near to the dead.” What was more, the great novelist added, Glamis was said to hide a secret room—a useful addition to any residence in 15th-century Scotland, where violence was seldom far away. Its location was known only to the Earl, his factor and his heir.

In one sense, however, the most interesting thing about Scott’s account is what it doesn’t say. The novelist wrote nothing to suggest that the castle’s hidden chamber had an occupant. Yet, within half a century of his visit, it had begun to be rumored that the room concealed an unknown captive—a prisoner who had been held there all his life.

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The plot was conceived over a round of drinks. One afternoon in July 1932, Francis Pasqua, Daniel Kriesberg and Tony Marino sat in Marino’s eponymous speakeasy and raised their glasses, sealing their complicity, figuring the job was already half-finished. How difficult could it be to push Michael Malloy to drink himself to death? Every morning the old man showed up at Marino’s place in the Bronx and requested “Another mornin’s morning, if ya don’t mind” in his muddled brogue; hours later he would pass out on the floor. For a while Marino had let Malloy drink on credit, but he no longer paid his tabs. “Business,” the saloonkeeper confided to Pasqua and Kriesberg, “is bad.”

Pasqua, 24, an undertaker by trade, eyed Malloy’s sloping figure, the glass of whiskey hoisted to his slack mouth. No one knew much about him—not even, it seemed, Malloy himself—other than that he had come from Ireland. He had no friends or family, no definitive date of birth (most guessed him to be about 60), no apparent trade or vocation beyond the occasional odd job sweeping alleys or collecting garbage, happy to be paid in alcohol instead of money. He was, wrote the Daily Mirror, just part of the “flotsam and jetsam in the swift current of underworld speakeasy life, those no-longer-responsible derelicts who stumble through the last days of their lives in a continual haze of ‘Bowery Smoke.’ ”

“Why don’t you take out insurance on Malloy?” Pasqua asked Marino that day, according to another contemporary newspaper report. “I can take care of the rest.”

Marino paused. Pasqua knew he’d pulled off such a scheme once before. The prior year, Marino, 27, had befriended a homeless woman named Mabelle Carson and convinced her to take out a $2,000 life insurance policy, naming him as the beneficiary. One frigid night he force-fed her alcohol, stripped off her clothing, doused the sheets and mattress with ice water, and pushed the bed beneath an open window. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as bronchial pneumonia, and Marino collected the money without incident.

Marino nodded and motioned to Malloy. “He looks all in. He ain’t got much longer to go anyhow. The stuff is gettin’ him.” He and Pasqua glanced over at Daniel Kriesberg. The 29-year-old grocer and father of three would later say he participated for the sake of his family. He nodded, and the gang set into motion a macabre chain of events that would earn Michael Malloy cult immortality by proving him nearly immortal. (More…)