office under
his own administration. And, finally, it was he who promoted me
to the rank of major-general in the regular army, the next day
after his inauguration as President.

It was a great disappointment to me to find only casual mention of
my name in General Grant's "Memoirs." But I was not only consoled,
but moved to deep emotion when told by his worthy son, Colonel
Frederick Dent Grant, that his father had not ceased up to the last
day of his life to cherish the same kind feeling he had always
manifested toward me, and that one of his last fruitless efforts,
when he could no longer speak, was to put on paper some legible
words mentioning my name.

General Sherman wrote that he could not understand Grant, and
doubted if Grant understood himself. A very distinguished statesman,
whose name I need not mention, said to me that, in his opinion,
there was nothing special in Grant to understand. Others have
varied widely in their estimates of that extraordinary character.
Yet I believe its most extraordinary quality was its extreme
simplicity--so extreme that many have entirely overlooked it in
their search for some deeply hidden secret to account for so great
a character, unmindful of the general fact that simplicity is one
of the most prominent attributes of greatness.

The greatest of all the traits of Grant's character was that which
lay always on the surface, visible to all who had eyes to see it.
That was his moral and intellectual integrity, sincerity, veracity,
and justice. He was incapable of any attempt to deceive anybody,
except for a legitimate purpose, as in military strategy; and,
above all, he was incapable of deceiving himself. He possessed
that rarest of all human faculties, the power of a perfectly accurate
estimate of himself, uninfluenced by pride, ambition, flattery, or
self-interest. Grant was very far from being a modest man, as the
word modest is generally understood. His just self-esteem was as
far above modesty as it was above flattery. The highest encomiums
were accepted for what he believed them to be worth. They did not
disturb his equilibrium in the slightest degree.

GRANT'S CONFIDENCE IN HIMSELF

While Grant knew his own merits as well as anybody did, he also
knew his own imperfections, and estimated them at their real value.
For example, his inability to speak in public, which produced the
impression of extreme modesty or diff