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

[194] described, and that Seward for the sake of place and power followed in the political somersault. No word intimating a belief that Seward originated Johnson's policy ever escaped him in my hearing, either in the excited intercourse of the time or in the deliberate discussions of later years.

It is needless to say that Grant thought Seward intellectual and able; and of course he never dreamed of denying his patriotism; but the genius of the one was so diametrically opposed to that of the other that Grant could not do justice to the considerations, whether of legitimate ambition or lofty statesmanship, that may have actuated Seward. He was too intensely himself to be sympathetic. He could not put himself into Seward's place. He could not understand how Seward could reverse the feelings and principles of a lifetime to remain in Johnson's Cabinet. He could not perceive that Seward, once the bugbear of the slave-holders, might take an exquisite pleasure in the thought that they owed their exemption from many misfortunes to the man they had so long and so bitterly reviled.

But although Grant thought Seward only a follower of Johnson in the Reconstruction policy, he certainly believed that many of the devices of Johnson were due to Seward's suggestion. He did not think Johnson clever enough to initiate all the craft that gave the country and Congress so much trouble and alarm. Many of the acutest arguments in defense of Johnson Grant thought were in reality perversions of Seward's intellect in an unworthy cause; and the effort to send Grant to Mexico he always attributed to Seward. The conception was worthy of the diplomatic Secretary, to whom it would fall to carry out the device if it succeeded; for if Grant had accepted the position pressed upon him he must have received his instructions from Seward, who had opposed and defeated Grant's Mexican policy. Those instructions, in fact, were written out, and Seward once began to read them in Cabinet, but Grant refused to hear them.