“The services of General Thomas in battling for the Union entitle him to some consideration.  He has repeatedly entered his protest against being assigned to either of the five military districts, and especially to being assigned to relieve General Sheridan.

“There are military reasons, pecuniary reasons, and above all, patriotic reasons, why this should not be insisted upon.

“I beg to refer to a letter marked ‘private,’ which I wrote to the President when first consulted on the subject of the change in the War Department.  It bears upon the subject of this removal, and I had hoped would have prevented it.

“I have the honor to be, with great respect, your obedient servant,

“U.  S. GRANT,
“General U. S. A., Secretary of War ad interim.

“His Excellency A. JOHNSON,
“President of the United States.”

I was ordered to command the Department of the Missouri (General Hancock, as already noted, finally becoming my successor in the Fifth Military District), and left New Orleans on the 5th of September.  I was not loath to go.  The kind of duty I had been performing in Louisiana and Texas was very trying under the most favorable circumstances, but all the more so in my case, since I had to contend against the obstructions which the President placed in the way from persistent opposition to the acts of Congress as well as from antipathy to me—­which obstructions he interposed with all the boldness and aggressiveness of his peculiar nature.

On more than one occasion while I was exercising this command, impurity of motive was imputed to me, but it has never been truthfully shown (nor can it ever be) that political or corrupt influences of any kind controlled me in any instance.  I simply tried to carry out, without fear or favor, the Reconstruction acts as they came to me.  They were intended to disfranchise certain persons, and to enfranchise certain others, and, till decided otherwise, were the laws of the land; and it was my duty to execute them faithfully, without regard, on the one hand, for those upon whom it was thought they bore so heavily, nor, on the other, for this or that political party, and certainly without deference to those persons sent to Louisiana to influence my conduct of affairs.

Some of these missionaries were high officials, both military and civil, and I recall among others a visit made me in 1866 by a distinguished friend of the President, Mr. Thomas A. Hendricks.  The purpose of his coming was to convey to me assurances of the very high esteem in which I was held by the President, and to explain personally Mr. Johnson’s plan of reconstruction, its flawless constitutionality, and so on.  But being on the ground, I had before me the exhibition of its practical working, saw the oppression and excesses growing out of it, and in the face of these experiences even Mr. Hendricks’s persuasive eloquence was powerless to convince me of its beneficence.  Later General Lovell H. Rousseau came down on a like mission, but was no more successful than Mr. Hendricks.