Excerpt from Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War, With Special Reference to the Work for the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley My wish in the first place is to give a faithful picture of the great President and the great General who guided us through the most tragic period of our National life. I do not pretend to write in any general sense of the military career Of Grant or the political life of Lincoln, but only of those incidents in connection with which I came into per sonal contact with these two men, and, above all, Of the character and standards Of each as I saw them. One of the strongest safeguards to American life is devotion to our heroes and reverence for the ideals to which they pledged themselves. Grant and Lincoln were pre-eminent among those who sacrificed the personal to the National life, and we can never look too closely to the examples which they prepared for us. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.