“There are a few characters,” says Macaulay, “which have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests; which have been tried in the furnace and have proved pure; which have been weighed in the balance and not found wanting; which have been declared sterling by the general consent of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the image and superscription of the Most High.” Such a character, it seems to me, was Ulysses S. Grant. From the day he won his first victory at Belmont until he sank to rest at Mt. McGregor, he lived in a light as fierce as that which beats upon a throne. For eight years, he was a soldier; for eight years, the President; and ever since, until the day of his death, the First Citizen of the Republic. What he said or left unsaid, what he did or left undone, during all those years, was noted by busy tongues and pens, many of them envious, many of them hostile, and many more, inspired by that strange perversity of human nature which rejoices to find some weakness, or flaw, or stain in a great man, anxious and eager to catch him doing something mean or unworthy. And through it all—through the fierce and dangerous fields of war, through the still more perplexing and dangerous fields of politics, and through the trials and temptations of a citizenship so elevated that its very height was dazzling—he moved on, serene, patient, inflexible, unstained. He disarmed partisan malice at last as he had disarmed Pemberton at Vicksburg; he triumphed over the rancor and enmity of civil life as he had routed Bragg at Mission Ridge; and finally, and before his death, all the warring factions of the land, North and South, East and West, surrendered to him their willing allegiance, as did Lee at Appomattox. The changes in the popular estimate of Grant’s character and abilities were as remarkable as everything else in his wonderful career. It was years before the carping military critics of the world would concede that he was a great soldier. He won his victories by accident, they said; he was a butcher; he was a drunkard; he was a figure-head for Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, who planned his campaigns. All this they said, as he swung across the continent from Donelson to Vicksburg, from Vicksburg to Chattanooga, from Chattanooga to Appomattox, conquering, in turn, every great soldier of the Confederacy; leaving behind him, everywhere, campaigns and victories as brilliant and complete as any Napoleon ever planned or won; always equal to the greatest emergencies, always ready for any contingency, and always master of every occasion.