Twenty Years in Europe

The interval between my resignation at Rome and my reappointment as Consul General for Switzerland was spent in my home in Iowa.

Early in 1886, the North American Review asked me to prepare and edit a series of General Sherman’s letters for the magazine.

I received an interesting letter from the General about the tempting offers made to him by the magazines. They make offers of that kind to one man in a million, and only one man in a million could decline them. He mentions his forthcoming book.

    “Washington, D. C., Feb. 3, 1886.

“Dear Byers: – I was glad to receive your letter of the 1st inst. It indicates a purpose to join in the throng now publishing articles about the war. Last year Rice, of the N. A. Review, offered me $1,000 for an article on Grant, which I declined and he obtained that of March for nothing. I hate controversy, but could not escape this with F-, who is an army officer, retired, and usually very accurate, but his denial to furnish me the source of his extract from one of my private letters led up to my reply in the March number. If you have read from the magazine itself, all right, but if you have only seen the newspaper extracts, I would like to have you get the Review itself and read the whole. The Century Magazine is also a very respectable vehicle for war stories and has tempted me with high offers in money, but I have resolved to keep out of the newspapers and magazines as far as they will let me, confining myself to the memoirs revised, which will be issued by the Appletons by May next. I have gone over all the proof and will now stand by it. The first and last chapters are new-as well as the index, maps and illustrations.

“We are all very well here and I shall regret to give up my own home here for a hotel in New York, but I shall never consent to housekeeping in New York.

“My best love to Mrs. Byers and the children.

    “Truly your friend,
    W. T. Sherman.”

At the General’s invitation I went to St. Louis, and for a time was a guest in his home as I had been before in Washington.

A few notes of the great commander’s life at this time may not be amiss here.

General Sherman was now a retired officer. After a great life on the military stage, he had himself rung down the curtain. He was living in a comfortable, brown, two-story brick house, at 912 Garrison Avenue.

His simple little office, where he spent most of his time, was down in the basement, just as it had been in Washington. The same little sign bearing the simple words:

“Office of General Sherman”

was on one of the basement windows. In this room, on shelves and in cases, were all the records of his life-his memoranda of the war, military maps, correspondence. There were letters on file in that little room from eminent men all over the country. A magazine editor once offered $40,000 for permission to go down into that basement and pick out the letters he would like to print in his magazine. The editor even offered a thousand dollars for one certain, single letter there. It was never printed till its importance was gone.

One evening he came down into the basement where I was sitting, and taking his keys out of his pocket threw them on the table beside me, saying: “There, I trust you with everything; unlock everything; use what you want.” The complete confidence thus placed in me, I recall with pride and affection. I recall, too, the responsibility I felt.

Night after night, day after day, I read among the letters, picking out only those that seemed of interest to the public, and to be perfectly proper to print.

At that time I edited for the North American Review six chapters of them. Nothing went without General Sherman’s approval. He allowed his clerk, Mr. Barrett, to copy for me. Hundreds of the most entertaining letters I regarded it indiscreet to print at that time, and they have never been printed yet.

The General and myself sat there in the basement by the little open fire many a time till twelve or one o’clock at night; I looking through the almost thousands of letters and papers, he smoking a cigar and reading. The poems of Burns lay there on his desk all the time, because Burns was his favorite poet. Dickens and Scott, he read time and again; some of the stories once a year, he said.

When I would find something of especial interest among the letters, I would speak of it. He would stop reading and, for an hour, tell me all about it, and add interesting things concerning the writer. What would I not now give could my memory recall faithfully his talks to me in the silence of those nights. He suffered some with asthma, and it was always easier for him to sit up far into the night and talk, than to go to bed. Sometimes a wee drop from a black bottle in the back room refreshed us both, without harming either.

About this time, a few over-zealous friends of Grant, not satisfied with the world’s recognition of his genius, were claiming for him the impossible merit of everything that happened in the war, even the origin of the March to the Sea. The claim was ridiculous, and I do not believe that General Grant personally had anything to do with it. But I am sure that Sherman felt that Grant ought to have spoken at this juncture.

One evening I came across an autograph letter from Grant to Sherman, congratulating him on the achievement of the March to the Sea, “a campaign,” in Grant’s words, “the like of which has not been read of in past history.” There was not a thought of claiming any of the glory for himself. Right beside it lay a letter from Robert E. Lee, telling how this movement of Sherman’s resulted eventually in the fall of Richmond. Reading these, determined me, while with General Sherman in his home, to write, myself, an account of the March to the Sea, for the North American Review. My article was printed in the Review, September, 1887.

When it was finished I asked the General to listen to it. He sent upstairs one morning for Mrs. Sherman to come down and hear it also. “Let me read it aloud,” said Mrs. Sherman. It was one of the delightful hours of my life, to sit there and hear the wife of the great soldier read to him my story of his March to the Sea. I watched his face while she read, and could see that his mind was again afire with the thought of the campaign. He made no important changes, and a note to the editor of the Review showed that he approved my paper fully.

Life went on in the General’s family very much as at Washington. It was a happy, hospitable home. “Tom,” the father now being reconciled to the idea of his being a priest, came up often from the college down town, and many were the interesting conversations I heard between the great soldier and his intellectual son. It seemed to me the same fire of intellect was in each, only it was all different in flame and purpose. Mrs. Sherman had a little office of her own upstairs, just as at her Washington home, where she devoted her energy to planning for the poor. She was a noble, unselfish woman, and her charities, unheralded to the world, did much to soften the hard lines of the unfortunate.

The General’s health was not the very best. He was often taking such severe colds as even threatened his life. The doctors were uneasy, and Mrs. Sherman was on one or two occasions much alarmed. “Should such a misfortune occur,” she said to me one morning after the breakfast, “should I survive him, I want you to undertake the publication of all my husband’s papers and correspondence. He has told me of his affection for you many times, and you know my own.” I was greatly touched by this new proof of confidence in me, but I could not but think that General Sherman had many years to live.

The General, simple in public life, was still simpler in his home. He came to breakfast mornings in his comfortable old slippers and wearing a shiny little morning coat that was more comfortable than decorative. After lunch at noon, he usually took an hour’s nap and then went down in the basement to his work of answering letters. He answered everybody, and gave himself as much labor in this imposed letter writing as if he were well paid for it. Hundreds and hundreds of people asked him to help them get office, and hundreds asked him for money. He gave a great deal, and the giving helped to keep him a comparatively poor man. Mrs. Sherman told me how he kept accounts at certain Washington stores, and sent needy men there almost daily with orders for hats, coats, etc. His daughter Lizzie was one of the kindest and sweetest spirits I ever knew. She was almost a constant companion of her father in his many travels.

We had pleasant chats every morning at the breakfast table, though it was nearly impossible to get the General away from the basement and his newspaper, till Mrs. S. had the papers put on the table with the coffee. Then the General would read and comment. He regarded the press almost as a necessary evil. Few of his comments were complimentary to it. He had a horror of reporters.

A great railroad strike was going on. Some sensational newspapers in St. Louis were helping to keep it up by encouraging the strikers. A month before, the same journals had been obsequious to the railroads. “Some day,” said the General one morning, throwing down the newspaper, “these pusillanimous scoundrels of editors will be for calling on me and on the country to save them from the very ruin they are now encouraging. They are pulling the house down on their own heads. If it could fall on them, only! But little newspapers care for the sorrow they carry to human breasts, if they can only start a sensation.”

He hated professional politicians even as much as such editors, but he discriminated between a man going to Congress for bread and butter, and a man who tried to labor for his country. Even Blaine, whom he so cordially honored, he thought a spoilsman at times, not always a statesman.

In the home here, Mrs. Sherman called him “Cump,” and that was the title he liked to hear. The name conveyed something dearer and better to him than titles and rank. He had no love for any of these empty sounding baubles, anyway, and never sought a promotion in his life.

One evening he was to address the Ransom Grand Army Post at St. Louis, and in the name of some patriotic man present a flag. He asked me to go along. After supper I came down and found him dressed and waiting for me in the drawing-room. “Where is your Grand Army badge?” he asked, observing I had none. I explained that mine was at home in Iowa. “You must have one,” he said, “I’ll give you this,” and taking the emblem from his breast he fastened it on my coat. I treasure it still. It is an heirloom for my son.

He took me to see Buffalo Bill, the Indian fighter, one day. It was at the Fair Ground. The scout came to the General’s box with all the fair manner of a high-born gentleman, saluted, bowed, advanced, took the extended hand and met a genuine soldier’s greeting. Sherman had known him on the plains, and respected him as a man of worth. “That man’s a genius,” he said, when Cody went down to the ring, “and he believes in himself. That’s half the battle of life.” Sherman, like Buffalo Bill, believed in himself. He knew what he could do, and did it, and asked neither praise nor pay.

That evening, one of Sherman’s daughters and a girl friend visiting in the family, danced with Buffalo Bill at a great ball. “He was the best dancer of them all,” said one of the girls on coming home. “Just too lovely for anything,” added the other. And this was the man of the prairies, the hunter, the scout. Environment doesn’t count for anything, after all.

One day while at the Shermans, a friend, Mr. Haydock, asked me to go with him to see Grant’s log house. It is on the old Dent farm in the woods, seven miles southwest of the city. This now neglected land was given to Mrs. Grant by her father, at her marriage. When Grant was thirty-two, he saw no prospects ahead of him in the army; so he resigned and went out here in the woods to live. “I had no means to stock the farm,” he wrote later, “and a house had to be built. I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather. If nothing else could be done, I would put a load of wood on the wagon and take it to the city for sale.” For four years, Grant and his family lived this obscure life here in a little log cabin he built with his own hands.

The cabin is now hard to find. The road is deserted, the yard is overgrown with tall grass, straggling rose bushes bloom in what was once a garden; the windows of the cabin are gone, the doors stand open.

Grant cut the trees, prepared and hauled the logs for the cabin himself, and a hired hand helped him to put them up. It is a typical Southern log house, one and a half stories high, two rooms below, separated by an open hall, two rooms above. There is no history of Grant’s life, during the years he struggled to make a living on this lonesome backwoods farm. Grant seldom alluded to it himself.

While walking over the deserted cabin and yard, I saw in my mind its whilom owner, the guest of peoples and potentates.

Sherman had an extravagant opinion of General Grant’s abilities. “Grant was the one level-headed man among us all,” he said to me one night, down in the basement of his home. Sherman went to the opera because he was fond of music, though he could not sing a note. If he kissed the pretty women behind the scenes sometimes, or more likely in front of the scenes, it was because the pretty women kissed him. I never saw a man so run after by womankind in my life. It was a great honor to have him touch their hands, their lips. Once in Switzerland, when he was leaving Bern on a train, the whole crowd of American women at the depot, old and young, pretty and ugly, children and all, kissed him.

When I was leaving his home at St. Louis, Miss Lizzie said I should have something to remember my visit by. “Then I want something from the little basement,” I said, “there is where I have spent most of my time.” “Papa, why not give him your paper weight.” It was a little bronze bust of General Grant that he had used on his desk for many years. It has been mine since that evening, though I needed nothing to remind me forever of the hours spent far into the night down in the basement of the Sherman home.

In April, I received an interesting letter from him on taxation:

    “St. Louis, Mo., April 25, 1886.

“Dear Byers: – I have your letter of the 18th, and though I have nothing to tell you, will answer. I understand that your article on the March to the Sea will be in the North American Review for May, and I will look for it. It might have been better had you applied to the Century Magazine, which seems to invite contributions illustrative of the war, though it seems partial to our adversaries. The absence of Mr. Rice in Europe, too, may be one cause of a relaxed interest in such articles as you could supply. J. R. is rather the workman than the editor, and is governed chiefly by the notoriety of the contribution rather than by the merit of the article.

“Hold on to your farm. This removal to the cheaper land of Dakota will not last long, as that is devoid of wood, and cold in the extreme. As soon as the few inviting places west are filled up, the tide will set back to Iowa. But I really do fear now an internal cause of the diminished value of land. Instead of supporting one government as in Europe, we have to support five-National, State, County, Township and Municipal-each of which expects for its support enough taxes for the whole. We are merely the nominal owners. The aggregate taxes here and with you, I infer, are equal to rent, and the question is: Who owns the farm? I infer the State does, and the nominal owner is merely the tenant at will. This fact, with the labor organizations, may bring about conflicts such as desolated Asia, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

“I will be in Chicago Decoration Day, Indianapolis June 2d, San Francisco Aug. 3–6, in Washington Territory and British Columbia till September, when I must come to Rock Island for the annual meeting of the Army of the Tennessee, Sept. 15–16, then for New York.

“Mrs. Sherman will go East about July 1st, and we will all meet in New York about Sept. 20th. I shall expect to see you at Rock Island.

“With best compliments to Mrs. Byers, and best wishes for your health and success.

    “Truly your friend,
    W. T. Sherman.”

Later, he wrote me his views on newspapers and war books:

    “St. Louis, Mo., June 11, 1886.

“Dear Byers: – I have your letter of the 8th, and note that you are now in correspondence with two of the best monthlies of the country. I feel assured that you will get along, though the speculation of buying young cattle and feeding them on your own land is a better business. The newspapers of our country have been as the morning mist, absolutely lost or dissipated by the noonday sun. The monthlies may hang on a little longer. And only printed volumes with indexes, collected in libraries, will be accepted as approximate truth.