Adam Badeau, Grant in peace: from Appomattox to Mount McGregor, a personal memoir

His political convictions, as I have shown, had been forming and crystallizing for several years, amid the changing circumstances and contingencies of the time; but the action of Johnson undoubtedly precipitated his conclusions. For Grant was subject to all the ordinary feelings and even passions of a man, and the long series of attempts first to beguile and cajole him, and afterward to entrap and misrepresent him, had their natural effect. They went hand in hand with what he thought the President's endeavors to thwart and frustrate the law, and the will of the loyal North. Finally, when Johnson at the same juncture assailed Grant's personal honor and defied the authority of Congress, the soldier resented one action while the citizen condemned the other. Doubtless the imputations on his character sharpened his appreciation of the public misconduct of his enemy; no one is proof against inducements and influences like these; but the fact did not lessen the purity of his conduct or the integrity of his motives. Christianity itself mingles personal considerations with those of abstract right and wrong; and a man who has been struck in a righteous cause is hardly to be blamed if he returns the blow with increased and indignant zeal. Grant, I repeat, was very human; tempted in all points like other men; he was made neither of wood nor stone, but of flesh and blood; and at this juncture the fervor of his public spirit was certainly intensified by his indignation at Johnson's behavior toward himself.

But he committed no injustice. He resented his own wrongs, yet he made no display of rancor and descended to no unworthy wiles. He was at one time summoned before Congress, but he rigidly confined his testimony to what he had seen and known, and refused to exaggerate either the language or acts of the President or his own impressions of