Grant’s Intentions in Sending Logan
“New York, February 23, 1884.
“Gen. John A. Logan, U. S. Senate, Washington, D. C.
“Dear General: Since I have been confined to my room I have conducted all my correspondence through a secretary, who is a stenographer, and he takes my dictation to the office and writes the letters out there as dictated, and by my direction signs my name. I intended that the letter which I wrote to you should be brought back to me for my own signature, and I sign this myself to show my entire responsibility for the one which you have just received, and which I hope was satisfactory to you.
“Very truly yours,
“U. S. Grant.”
The passion and prejudice begotten in the minds of Thomas’s soldiers and their friends by injustice, real or fancied, done or proposed to be done to him by his superiors in rank, have rendered impossible any calm discussion of questions touching his military career. There is not yet, and probably will not be in our lifetime, a proper audience for such discussion. But posterity will award justice to all if their deeds have been such as to save their names from oblivion.
Time works legitimate “revenge,” and makes all things even. When I was a boy at West Point I was court-martialed for tolerating some youthful “deviltry” of my classmates, in which I took no part myself, and was sentenced to be dismissed. Thomas, then already a veteran soldier, was a member of the court, and he and one other were the only ones of thirteen members who declined to recommend that the sentence be remitted. This I learned in 1868, when I was Secretary of War. Only twelve years later I was able to repay this then unknown stern denial of clemency to a youth by saving the veteran soldier’s army from disaster, and himself from the humiliation of dismissal from command on the eve of victory. Five years later still, I had the satisfaction, by intercession with the President, of saving the same veteran general from assignment to an inferior command, and of giving him the military division to which my assignment had been ordered. When death had finally relieved him from duty, and not till then, did I consent to be his successor. In 1879 I had the satisfaction, after many months of patient investigation, of rendering justice to the other of those two unrelenting soldiers who, of all the thirteen, could not find it in their hearts to recommend clemency to an erring youth; I was president of the board which reversed the judgment of the court-martial in the case of Fitz-John Porter.
I believe it must now be fully known to all who are qualified to judge and have had by personal association or by study of history full opportunities to learn the truth, that General Thomas did not possess in a high degree the activity of mind necessary to foresee and provide for all the exigencies of military operations, nor the mathematical talent required to estimate “the relations of time, space, motion, and force” involved in great problems of war. His well-known high qualities in other respects obscured these imperfections from the great majority of those who surrounded him during the war, and rendered the few educated soldiers who were able to understand his true merits the more anxious to aid him and save him from personal defeat. And no one, I am sure, of his comrades in arms desires to detract from the great fame which is justly his due; for, according to the best judgment of mankind, moral qualities, more than intellectual, are the foundation of a great and enduring fame. It was “Old Pap” Thomas, not General Thomas, who was beloved by the Army of the Cumberland; and it is the honest, conscientious patriot, the firm, unflinching old soldier, not the general, whose name will be most respected in history.