Abraham Lincoln, when describing his fighting general to a friend remarked that, “He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe he had been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here.”
“Grant is the first [true] general I have had”, Lincoln continued, “You know how it’s been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn’t so with Grant. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me. He doesn’t ask impossibilities of me, and he’s the first general I’ve had that didn’t.”
The root of Ulysses S. Grant’s unassuming manner was his charitable nature. He was always able to place himself in the shoes of another, even when they were fiercely adversarial to him. He knew President Lincoln had his job and he had his.
When Grant met General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House as the Civil War’s end drew near, he experienced a moment of remorse at the capitulation of “a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.” This feeling inspired the Union general to prepare charitable terms of surrender: “… each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”
Lee, concerned that his men needed to make their long way home, humbly requested that his soldiers be able keep their horses. Grant readily agreed. As the Confederate General and his downtrodden men began to leave, Grant ordered his troops to stop all celebration, insisting that the “war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again.”
As President, Ulysses S. Grant, would continue his charitable ways, sometimes reluctantly. After a hard day’s work at The White House, the old general would go over to the Willard Hotel to relax and smoke a cigar or two in the hotel lobby. The denizens of D.C., eager to gain the favor of the president, soon discovered that they might catch the quiet man in the lobby. The President valued his solitude over most anything but would indulge them nonetheless. It was there that Grant would coin the phase we all know well today – he labeled the fussy crowd around him, “Lobbyists.”
