[
499]
Letter no.
Thirty-six.
With this letter
General Grant enclosed the reply to the
Comte de Paris above given.
He also refers to my account of the explosion of
Burnside's Mine at
Petersburg.
While I was at
Rome with
General Grant I was laid up for a week or more with a lameness in a wounded leg. I had not been able to obtain a room in the same hotel with him, and he came to see me and sit with me daily until I recovered.
During this period I wrote a letter to the
New York Herald contradicting certain statements that had been published by
ex-Secretary Welles of
Lincoln's and
Johnson's Cabinets, and
General Richard Taylor of the Confederate army, in regard to the
Wilderness campaign.
This paper announced that it was written with
Grant's sanction, and in fact it was read and revised by him in advance of publication.
It is to this that he refers in the following letter.
When
General Grant wrote that he was ‘tired’ of ‘going all the time,’ he had just returned from
Rome,
Florence, and
Venice; but from
Cairo he had written: ‘Our trip has been a most enjoyable one, and the sights exceed in colossal grandeur the guide-book descriptions.’
The contrast in his impressions and emotions is characteristic.
The works of art and even the antiquities of
Italy were tedious to him, while the
Egyptian monuments excited his liveliest interest.
In the same way his letters from
China and
Japan and
India were full of comments on the people and institutions, but
European civilization seemed to provoke only comparatively languid remarks.
Perhaps it was too much like our own.
My dear General,—I return you
Porter's, and the
Count de Paris' letters and the part of chapter of your book.
I feel very sure you have the
Vicksburg surrender right, and see nothing wrong in the printed matter you send.
If there is anything it is in not showing the failure of
Warren more distinctly.
But that I
