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

Thus Washburne was supplanted in a week by Fish, Stewart's name was withdrawn and Boutwell's substituted, Schofield was followed before the end of the month by Rawlins, and in less than a year Akerman succeeded Hoar. All of these changes came from Grant's inexperience or from the secrecy with which he had veiled his intentions, not only from the individuals most affected, but from others who might have predicted, or perhaps prevented what occurred.

Finally, however, the Cabinet was constructed, and the new President began his administration of the Government. He was the same man who had been surrounded at Belmont and nearly crushed at Shiloh, who had plodded through the marshes of Vicksburg and fought the weary forty days in the Wilderness. He had made, indeed, a false start, but it was not the first time, and one rebuff never daunted or discouraged Grant. He remembered that he had overcome Johnson in politics as well as Lee in war, and he felt no unwillingness or inability to cope with his new difficulties.

Alexander T. Stewart was a New York merchant who had been stanchly loyal, as well as liberal with his wealth and his influence and his labor, in the cause of the Union, and he early became one of Grant's most devoted friends. The stand he took during the Rebellion brought him into further prominence, and first made him more than a great tradesman. It showed him, indeed, in his largest aspect; for he was narrow in many things. The lack of early advantages was more apparent in him than in many of the self-made men of America. It was not only that he had the true merchant spirit—that he was munificent with millions and mean about a penny; not so much that he showed the lack of scholarship or deficiency in other acquirements; but there was a smallness about his ideas, a pettiness at times about his feeling, a lack of many sides to his character—all of which betrayed the life of application to business he had led for more than forty years—so close indeed, that he had time for nothing else. And yet it was this very life that resulted in his mammoth fortune and the importance