?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(GRANT, ULYSSES S.) A cigar said to be taken from the dying president's final box, with a provenance letter. Cigar, 4 inches long, in glass tube sealed with cork bearing "Las Palmas" label of Chas. Jacobs & Co.; with letter from T. Bee to Captain Joshua A. Fessenden, 2 pages, 7x4 1/2 inches, worn and dampstained. West Point, NY, 7 September 1889 (letter date)
Bee's letter reads: "I take pleasure in sending you a cigar, one of the last in the last box used by Gen. U.S. Grant. Lieut. Totten was ordered to join his battery (Light Batt., 4th Art'y, Newport, RI). Wagenor and I were ordered to pack his furniture. Lieut. Totten gave the enclosed bottle & cigar to Wagenor. He gave it to me, and I, knowing the captain's feeling and politics in regard to Gen. Grant, take pleasure in presenting it to Capt. J.A. Fessenden, if the captain will take the trouble to write a line to Lieut. Otten. He will verify my statement as to genuineness and how I came in possession of the cigar." The convoluted story holds up somewhat, as far as we can verify it. 1st Lieutenant Charles A.L. Totten (1851-1908) of the 4th United States Artillery served from 1883 to 1886 as Professor of Military Science and Tactics at the Cathedral School of St. Paul, a new military high school in Garden City, NY. President Grant died in upstate New York in July 1885. In April 1886, Totten's term at St. Paul ended, and he was indeed transferred to Fort Adams in Rhode Island. The letter author and his friend Wagenor, we might assume, were cadets at St. Paul's. As for the cigar, Charles Jacobs & Co. began manufacturing Las Palmas cigars in San Francisco in 1883, and soon became the leading cigar manufacturer on the Pacific coast. We don't know if President Grant had Las Palmas cigars shipped in from San Francisco; we don't know how the late president's cigars ended up in the hands of a young Long Island military school instructor. All we can do is accept Mr. Bee's word for what it's worth.
