President.  “Mrs. Lincoln’s dinner without you would be Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”  “I appreciate the honor Mrs. Lincoln would do me,” said the General, “but time is very important now.  I ought to be at the front, and a dinner to me means a million dollars a day lost to the country.”  Lincoln was pleased with this answer, and said cheerfully, “Well, we’ll have the dinner without you.”

After Lincoln’s first meeting with General Grant he was asked regarding his personal impressions of the new commander.  He replied, “Well, I hardly know what to think of him.  He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw.  He makes the least fuss of any man I ever knew.  I believe on several occasions he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here.  It’s about so all around.  The only evidence you have that he’s in any particular place is that he makes things move.”  To a subsequent inquiry as to his estimate of Grant’s military capacities, Lincoln responded, with emphasis:  “Grant is the first General I’ve had. He’s a General.”  “How do you mean, Mr. Lincoln?” his visitor asked.  “Well, I’ll tell you what I mean,” replied Lincoln.  “You know how it’s been with all the rest.  As soon as I put a man in command of the army, he’d come to me with the plan of a campaign, and about as much as to say:  ’Now I don’t believe I can do it, but if you say so I’ll try it on,’ and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me.  They all wanted me to be the General.  Now, it isn’t so with Grant.  He hasn’t told me what his plans are.  I don’t know and I don’t want to know.  I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.  When any of the rest set out on a campaign they’d look over matters and pick out some one thing they were short of and they knew I couldn’t give them, and tell me they couldn’t hope to win unless they had it—­and it was most generally cavalry.  Now when Grant took hold I was waiting to see what his pet impossibility would be, and I reckoned it would be cavalry, of course, for we hadn’t horses enough to mount what men we had.  There were fifteen thousand men, or thereabouts, up near Harper’s Ferry, and no horses to put them on.  Well, the other day Grant sent to me about these very men, just as I expected; but what he wanted to know was whether he could make infantry of ’em or disband ’em.  He doesn’t ask impossibilities of me, and he’s the first General I’ve had that didn’t.”  On another occasion Lincoln said of Grant:  “The great thing about him is his cool persistency of purpose.  He is not easily excited, and he has the grip of a bulldog. When he once gets his teeth in, nothing can shake him off.”

The President’s satisfaction with the new commander was speedily communicated to him in a characteristically frank manner, in a letter dated April 30, 1864.

     LIEUTENANT-GENERAL GRANT:—­