him simply
as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life
was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to
callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his
Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at
the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as
a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained
in the words "a rude man." Thus the Grant that we discover in the
recollections of a few loyal and loving friends, and in the memoirs which
he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he
finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways
pathetic, figure. He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the
work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business
aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to
West Point. Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his
health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a
teacher of mathematics. But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in
all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and--so he later
thought--saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air.
After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at
thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a
shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink,
and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father's.
Rough in appearance and in manner he remained--the very opposite of
smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in
speech or social intercourse. Unlike many rough people, he had a really
simple character--truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests,
or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on
the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly
sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive. His
friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to
be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own
account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train,
heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the
comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which
broke down Grant's habitual self-possession and good tem