Lincoln's White House Secretary

[David Lockmiller]

President Lincoln responded to a question from Stoddard about Grant:

Grant is the first general I've had. He's a general! . . . You know how it's been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, he'd come to me with a plan of campaign and about as much say, "Now, I don't believe I can do it, but if you say so, I'll try it on," and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. 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'm glad to find a man who can go ahead without me. . . . You see, when any of 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 them 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 his 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 on. Well, the other day, just as I expected, Grant sent to me about those very men; but what he wanted to know was whether he should disband them or turn them into infantry. He doesn't ask me to do impossibilities for him, and he's the first general I've had that didn't!

(Source: "Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln," Compiled and Edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, pp 426-427.)