It was thus that after the general had gone out of office and made the famous journey round the world, and had come to visit relatives in Kentucky, that he accepted a dinner invitation from me, and I had a number of his friends to meet him.
Among these were Dr. Richardson, his early schoolmaster when the Grant family lived at Maysville, and Walter Haldeman, my business partner, a Maysville boy, who had been his schoolmate at the Richardson Academy, and General Cerro Gordo Williams, then one of Kentucky’s Senators in Congress, and erst his comrade and chum when both were lieutenants in the Mexican War. The bars were down, the windows were shut and there was no end of hearty hilarity. Dr. Richardson had been mentioned by Mr. Haldeman as “the only man that ever licked Grant,” and the general promptly retorted “he never licked me,” when the good old doctor said, “No, Ulysses, I never did—nor Walter, either—for you two were the best boys in school.”
I said “General Grant, why not give up this beastly politics, buy a blue-grass farm, and settle down to horse-raising and tobacco growing in Kentucky?” And, quick as a flash—for both he and the company perceived that it was “a leading question”—he replied, “Before I can buy a farm in Kentucky I shall have to sell a farm in Missouri,” which left nothing further to be said.
There was some sparring between him and General Williams over their youthful adventures. Finally General Williams, one of the readiest and most amusing of talkers, returned one of General Grant’s sallies with, “Anyhow, I know of a man whose life you took unknown to yourself.” Then he told of a race he and Grant had outside of Galapa in 1846. “Don’t you remember,” he said, “that riding ahead of me you came upon a Mexican loaded with a lot of milk cans piled above his head and that you knocked him over as you swept by him?”
“Yes,” said Grant, “I believed if I stopped or questioned or even deflected it would lose me the race. I have not thought of it since. But now that you mention it I recall it distinctly.”
“Well,” Williams continued, “you killed him. Your horse’s hoof struck him. When, seeing I was beaten, I rode back, his head was split wide open. I did not tell you at the time because I knew it would cause you pain, and a dead greaser more or less made no difference.”
Later on General Grant took desk room in Victor Newcomb’s private office in New York. There I saw much of him, and we became good friends. He was the most interesting of men. Soldierlike—monosyllabic—in his official and business dealings he threw aside all formality and reserve in his social intercourse, delightfully reminiscential, indeed a capital story teller. I do not wonder that he had constant and disinterested friends who loved him sincerely.
IV
It has always been my opinion that if Chester A. Arthur had been named by the Republicans as their candidate in 1884 they would have carried the election, spite of what Mr. Blaine, who defeated Arthur in the convention, had said and thought about the nomination of General Sherman. Arthur, like Grant, belonged to the category of lovable men in public life.
There was a gallant captain in the army who had slapped his colonel in the face on parade. Morally, as man to man, he had the right of it. But military law is inexorable. The verdict was dismissal from the service. I went with the poor fellow’s wife and her sister to see General Hancock at Governor’s Island. It was a most affecting meeting—the general, tears rolling down his cheeks, taking them into his arms, and, when he could speak, saying: “I can do nothing but hold up the action of the court till Monday. Your recourse is the President and a pardon; I will recommend it, but”—putting his hand upon my shoulder—“here is the man to get the pardon if the President can be brought to see the case as most of us see it.”