A Call With W.D.Howells On General Grant(Dictated in 1885)

Howells wrote me that his old father, who was well along in the seventies, was in great distress about his poor little consulate up in Quebec. Somebody, not being satisfied with the degree of poverty already conferred upon him by a thoughtful and beneficent Providence, was anxious to add to it by acquiring the Quebec consulate. So Howells thought if we could get General Grant to say a word to President Arthur it might have the effect of stopping this effort to oust old Mr. Howells from his position. Therefore, at my suggestion Howells came down, and we went to New York to lay the matter before the general. We found him at No. 2 Wall Street, in the principal office of Grant & Ward, brokers.
I stated the case and asked him if he wouldn't write a word on a card which Howells could carry to Washington and hand to the President.
But, as usual, General Grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and also determined to do a great deal more for you than you could possibly have the effrontery to ask him to do. Apparently he never meets anybody halfway; he comes nine-tenths of the way himself voluntarily. "No," he said, he would do better than that, and cheerfully; he was going to Washington in a couple of days to dine with the President and he would speak to him and make it a personal matter. Now, as General Grant not only never forgets a promise, but never even the shadow of a promise, he did as he said he would do, and within a week came a letter from the Secretary of State, Mr. Frelinghuysen, to say that in no case would old Mr. Howells be disturbed. And he wasn't. He resigned a couple of years later.
But to go back to the interview with General Grant, he was in a humor to talk--in fact, he was always in a humor to talk when no strangers were present--and he resisted all our efforts to leave him.
He forced us to stay and take luncheon in a private room and continued to talk all the time. (It was bacon and beans. Nevertheless, "How he sits and towers"--Howells, quoting from Dante.)
He remembered "Squibob" Derby at West Point very well. He said that Derby was forever drawing caricatures of the professors and playing jokes of all kinds on everybody. He also told of one thing, which I had heard before but which I have never seen in print. At West Point, the professor was instructing and questioning a class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege, and he said this, as nearly as I can remember. I cannot quote General Grant's words:
Given: that a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of men, provisions, etc., are so and so--it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. Now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed?
Derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question. He said, "I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days I would change places with him."
I tried very hard to get General Grant to write his personal memoirs for publication, but he would not listen to the suggestion. His inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily coming forward before the public and placing himself under criticism as an author. He had no confidence in his ability to write well, whereas everybody else in the world, excepting himself, is aware that he possesses an admirable literary gift and style. He was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would be a humiliation, too. He instanced the fact that General Badeau's military history of General Grant had had but a trifling sale, and that John Russell Young's account of General Grant's trip around the globe had hardly any sale at all. But I said that these were not instances in point; that what another man might tell about General Grant was nothing, while what General Grant should tell about himself, with his own pen, was a totally different thing. I said that the book would have an enormous sale; that it should be in two volumes, sold, in cash, at $3.50 apiece, and that the sale in two volumes would certainly reach half a million sets. I said that, from my experience, I could save him from making unwise contracts with publishers, and could also suggest the best plan of publication--the subscription plan--and find for him the best men in that line of business.
I had in my mind at that time the American Publishing Company, of Hartford, and, while I suspected that they had been swindling me for ten years, I was well aware that I could arrange the contract in such a way that they could not swindle General Grant. But the general said that he had no necessity for any addition to his income. I knew that he meant by that that his investments, through the firm in which his sons were partners, were paying him all the money he needed. So I was not able to persuade him to write a book. He said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them behind him; and then, if his children chose to make them into a book, that would answer.