It must he confessed that Grant’s explanations of his later attitude towards Smith, and of the reasons for relieving him and restoring Butler to command, were neither full nor always stated in the same terms.  He ignores the subject entirely in his memoirs, but it so happens that Mr. Dana, then Assistant Secretary of War, was sitting with General Grant when Butler, clad in full uniform, called at headquarters and was admitted.  Dana describes Butler as entering the General’s presence with a flushed face and a haughty air, holding out the order, relieving him from command in the field, and asking:  “General Grant, did you issue this order?” To which Grant in a hesitating manner replied:  “No, not in that form.”  Dana, perceiving at this point that the subject under discussion was an embarrassing one, and that the interview was likely to be unpleasant, if not stormy, at once took his leave, but the impression made upon his mind by what he saw while present was that Butler had in some measure “cowed” his commanding officer.  What further took place neither General Grant nor Mr. Dana has ever said.  Butler’s Book, however, contains what purports to be a full account of the interview, but it is to be observed that it signally fails to recite any circumstance of an overbearing nature.  It is abundantly evident, however, from the history of the times and from contemporaneous documents published in the Records, that neither the working arrangements by which Butler commanded an army from his headquarters at Fortress Monroe or in the field while the major part of it, under the command of Smith, was co-operating with the Army of the Potomac, nor his relations with either his superiors or subordinates, were at all satisfactory.  In the nature of the case, they could not be.  Butler was a lawyer and politician accustomed to browbeat where he could not persuade.  He and Smith while starting out as friends, early came to distrust each other.  Smith, who was as before stated on intimate terms at general headquarters, made his views fully known from time to time, and especially in a frank and manly letter of July 2, 1884, to both Rawlins and Grant, and from the correspondence of the latter with Halleck, it is certain that both sympathized with Smith at first.  It was evidently at Grant’s request to Halleck, then acting as chief of staff and military adviser at Washington, that Smith was assigned to the Eighteenth Corps, and at Grant’s request that he was relieved from it, without explanation.  The undisputed fact is that the countermanding order was issued after a personal interview between Grant and Butler, the details of which are only partly known, and that no further explanation consistent with the continuance of friendly relations between Grant and Smith has ever been given.