Then in the latter part of June he says Grant called at his Headquarters. Knowing Grant's infirmity, he claims he gave him liquor sufficient to make him “drunk,” and then went “out to see him on his horse,” but called the attention of his staff officer as a witness to the condition of the general-in-chief of the army, saying of his confiding and ever-supporting friend that he would take it as a weapon to use against him, and which Smith himself afterwards did use. Then he got leave of absence, meantime writing to Washington to his coadjutor, Senator Foote, to have himself put in command of the Eighteenth Corps, independent of me, by his influence through his friend Senator Foote with Halleck.2
Before the 2d of July Grant learned that Smith had, in addition to his abuse of Meade, whose command of the Army of the Potomac he sought from Grant, induced a Tribune correspondent to publish a libel upon Hancock. Grant gave me an order to arrest the correspondent, and send him to him. Thereupon Grant caused the order in favor of Smith to be suspended, and had a confidential conversation with him on his return from his leave on the 18th, and then told him he could not relieve me, and sent Smith to New York, virtually dismissing him from the army. Being so dismissed, in ten days he wrote this most infamous and astounding letter, in which he recites to Foote his own base betrayal of his friend and commander, and his misconduct toward him as his guest, and offers to furnish Foote with further evidence by which to defame and vilify Grant, the commander of the whole armies of the United States, on whose skill and conduct the safety of the country depended,--showing that he could be true to no friend. After his friend McClellan,--the only other one we hear that Smith ever had,--was sent forever to private
