The only time General Grant ever mentioned liquor to me was about last April or possibly May (1885). He said, 'If only I could build up my strength! The doctors urge whiskey and champagne, but I can't take them. I can't abide the taste of any kind of liquor.' Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor had become an offense? Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others and likewise himself that he had never even had the taste for it? It sounded like the latter but that no evidence.
He told me in the Fall of '84 that there was something the matter with his throat and that at the suggestion of the physicians he had reduced his smoking to once cigar a day. Then he added in a casual way that he didn't even care for that one and seldom smoked it. I could understand that feeling. He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination - the desire. He had gone to the root, not the trunk. It's the perfect way and the only way (I speak from experience). How I do hate these enemies of the human race who go around enslaving God's free people with pledges - to quit drinking instead of wanting to quit drinking.
I am reminded now of another incident. The day of the funeral I sat over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman and Senator Sherman, and among other things, Gen. Sherman said with impatient scorn, 'The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being to stand rude language and indelicate stories! Why Grant was full of humor and full of appreciation of it. I have sat with him by the hour listening to Jim Nye's yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye's histories, Clemens. It makes me sick - the newspaper nonsense. Grant was no namby-pamby fool. He was a man - all over - rounded and complete...'
The sick room bought out the points of General Grant's character - some of them, particularly, to wit: his patience. His indestructible equability of temper. His exceedingly gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity. His loyalty: to friends, convictions, to promises, to half-promises. (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage, I wanted to implore him to repudiate it. Fred Grant said, 'Save your labor. I know him. He is in doubt whether he made that half-promise or not - and he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt. He will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying.' Fred Grant was right, he did fulfill it). His aggrivatingly trustful nature. His genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-deprecation, poverty in the quality of vanity. And, in no contradiction to this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers and general ruck sent to him by Tom, Dick and Harry from everywhere, a pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention. He was the most lovable great child in the world.
And his fortitude! He was under sentence of death last Spring. He sat thinking, musing, for several days, nobody knows what about, then he pulled himself together and set out to finish that book, a colossal task for a dying man. Presently his hand gave out. Fate seemed to have got him checkmated. Dictation was suggested. No, he could never do that, had never tried it, too old to learn now. By and by - if he could do Appomattox - well... So he sent for a stenographer and dictated 9,000 words at a single sitting! - Never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never repeating - and in the written-out copy, hardly a correction. Then I enlarged the book - had to. Then he lost his voice. But he was not quite done, however. There was no end of little plums and spices to be stuck in here and there. And this work he patiently continued a few lines a day , with his pad and pencil till far into July, at Mt. McGregor. One day he put his pencil aside and said he was done - there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later.
