Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 February 1900 — Lincoln’s Fondness for Grant. [ARTICLE]

Lincoln’s Fondness for Grant.

An amusing and possibly instructive anecdote, in which Lincoln and Grant figure, and showing the latter’s estimate of cavalry, is related by Mr. William O. Stoddard, for some time one of the former’s private secretaries. The general had not long been in command of the Army of the Potomac, when one day Mr. Stoddard asked Lincoln’s opinion of hfml “Grant,” replied the President, “is the first general I’ve had. He’s the gen-

eral!” Remembering the high esteem in which McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade had been held, Mr. Stoddard asked Lincoln to explain, and this is what he said: “You see, when any op the rest set out on a campaign they’d look over matters and pick out some one thing they were short of and they knew I couldn’t give ’em, and tell me they couldn’t hope to win unless they had it; and it was most generally cavalry. Now, when Grant took hold, I was waiting to see what hia pet impossibility would be, and I reckoned it would be cavalry, as a matter of course, for we hadn’t horses enough to mount even what men we had. There were 15,000 or thereabouts up near Harper’s Ferry, and no horses to put them tin. Well, the other day, just as I expected, Grant sent to me for those very men; but what he wanted to know was whether he could disband ’em or turn ’em into infantry! He doesn’t ask me to do impossibilities for him, and he’s the first general I’ve had that didn’t.”-—Pitts-burg Dispatch.