Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[696] only sufficient to cause his removal, but had caused a very great disaster to the country; yet, while he was a brave enough soldier when left to his separate command, he always employed his time in making reconnoissances and not in making movements when ordered. I said to him: “You know his obstinacy and insubordination, and you know that he is not satisfied with anything that anybody else suggests, and he has not.” ¹ And I appealed to his justice whether such an act could be done against me upon the representations of such a man. He said this was not what he wanted at all, and that he would remedy it. I bowed and left him. Soon after he issued an order² revoking the order referred to, and a little later he relieved Smith from command, and sent him after his friend McClellan into retirement, of whom in New York Smith immediately became a very violent political supporter. Grant then ordered the Nineteenth Corps to my command.³

I am thus careful in giving exactly what was said between General Grant and myself for a reason which will presently appear.

Within ten days after the receipt by Smith of the lieutenant-general's order relieving him from command, he wrote a letter⁴ to Senator Foote, his coadjutor, in the attempt to. get me relieved, who put it in such condition that it has been published. It is such a letter as no honorable, decent, well-disposed man could have written under any possible temptation. It contains calumnies upon myself as well as upon General Grant. Fortunately I am alive to contradict them.

Smith says in this letter that the last of June or the first of July, 1864, General Grant, accompanied by myself, came to his (Smith's) headquarters, and that the lieutenant-general, after having been there a while said to me: “General, that drink of whiskey I took has done me good,” and then asked Smith to give him another,--intending it to be inferred that I gave Grant the whiskey. And knowing, as he says, that Grant drank too much, and not thinking that it would be polite to refuse him in my presence, he had a bottle opened for him, and gave him a glass of whiskey, without asking me to a glass or taking one himself. After Grant had taken a drink the bottle was corked up again and put away,--not the usual manner in which