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

[257] have recommended or desired, but Congress laid down the law and General Grant as President executed it. During the twelve years of his civil career, for in reality this began with Johnson's accession to power, he performed a task fully equal in importance to the country to whatever he achieved in war. A man with less sense and patriotism, or more ambition, might in his position, and with his immense popularity, have undone much that he had accomplished in the war. But Grant's self-abnegation was fully equal to Washington's at the close of the Revolution.

It is true no crown was ever offered him, and the country would certainly have hurled him into insignificance or worse had he attempted to seize one; but there were a thousand opportunities to increase his prerogative and confirm his power which he steadily refused. All who knew him closely at the times when temptation might have been strong with other men, will assuredly testify that the thought of selfaggrandize-ment was always furthest from his mind. He had, indeed, an apparent lack of ambition, and even of aspiration, that amounted almost to indifference; a singular moderation running through his whole character, which some considered stolidity; but which tempered what without it would have been harsher qualities, and produced all the results of wisdom, patience, judgment, and even far-sighted patriotism. He saw, even plainer than his political friends, the possibilities that told in his own favor and he put them away.

Shortly after the close of the war I was present when Charles Sumner proposed to him that a painting should be placed at the Capitol to represent the surrender of Lee; but Grant declared that he was unwilling that any commemoration of the defeat and disaster of one section of the country should be perpetuated at the Capitol. Again, a few days before his first inauguration, Mr. Blaine, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, formally suggested that Congress should allow Grant a leave of absence from the army for four