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

[85] country. A Cabinet Minister and the General of the Army were doing their utmost to thwart the President; the two men of all then living who had been foremost in the struggle against rebellion were opposing the successor of Abraham Lincoln. The President himself, and all but one of his legal advisers, were engaged in the effort to subvert or pervert the declared will of the people, and those who in ordinary times should and would have been his most faithful supporters, now deemed it their highest duty to watch him, to check him, to detect his plans, to disclose to each other his movements, to unmask his designs, to circumvent and restrain and baffle his schemes. For they regarded the man who should have been the first servant of the State as at this moment its most dangerous enemy. They thought he was undoing all that they had achieved, bringing back the rule they had overturned, defying the decision of the faithful North, installing sedition in the place of loyalty. On the 7th of June Grant wrote to Sheridan as follows:

I was absent from here on my way to West Point when the correspondence commenced between you and the Secretary of War which culminated in the removal of Governor Wells. I knew nothing of it, except what was published in the papers, until my return here yesterday. The Secretary's dispatch was in obedience to an order from the President written on Saturday before starting South, but not delivered to the Secretary until Monday after I left my office. I know Mr. Stanton is disposed to support you, not only in this last measure, but in every official act of yours thus far. He cannot say so because it is in Cabinet he has to do this, and there is no telling when he may not be overruled; and it is not in keeping with his position to announce beforehand that he intends to differ with his associate advisers.

In fact both Grant and Stanton were frequently compelled to issue orders the purpose of which they abhorred; orders which, though clearly designed to conflict with the intention of the law, were skillfully framed so as to be technically