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