Toward the close of his second administration, Grant thus reviewed, in a private conversation with Henry Clay Trumbull, the criticisms of his public career:
I don’t wonder that people differ with me, and that they think I am not doing the best that could be done. I can understand how they may blame me for a lack of knowledge or judgment. But what hurts me is to have them talk as if I didn’t love my country and wasn’t doing the best I knew how. It was just that way in war-time. I didn’t do as well as might have been done. A great many times I didn’t do as well as I was trying to do. Often I didn’t do as well as I expected to do. But I had my plans and was trying to carry them out. They called me “fool” and “butcher.” They said I didn’t know anything and hadn’t any plans. But I kept on and kept on, and by and by Richmond was taken, and I was at Appomattox Court House, and then they couldn’t find words enough to praise me. I suppose it will be so now. In spite of mistakes and failures I shall keep at it. By and by we’ll have specie payments resumed, reconstruction will be complete, good feeling will be restored between North and South; we shall be at Appomattox again, and then I suppose they’ll praise me.
(2431)
Praise Helpful—See [Encouragement].
Praise, Judicious—See [Heart-hunger, Satisfying].
PRAISE, SEEKING
A delicate woman, without children, and married to a superior but occupied and preoccupied man, suffered intensely when her husband neither perceived nor commented upon a new costume, or upon some ornament she had added to the drawing-room. Never a word of praise escaped his lips. One day she told him the sorrow this caused her. “But what do you want?” he replied, distrest. “I don’t know how to observe such things. What must I do?”
The wife reflected a moment, and then the two arranged that when there was anything unusual the wife was to make him a certain sign. His attention called, he would then understand, look, and admire. “And now I am satisfied,” she said, a little ashamed of her childishness. “What he says will not be spontaneous, I know, and yet I shall be pleased to hear it; it will brighten my life.”
This absurd, and yet touching incident reveals a state of mind that certain natures can not understand, but which is, nevertheless, more common than we think.—Dora Melegari, “Makers of Sorrow and Makers of Joy.”
(2432)