Joseph Fouché shares a story from when Grant met Bismarck, harking back to when Sheridan met Bismarck:
One of the prince’s first questions was about General Sheridan.“The general and I,” said the prince, ‘”were fellow campaigners in France, and we became great friends.”
General Grant said that he had had letters from Sheridan recently and he was quite well.
“Sheridan,” said the prince, “seemed to be a man of great ability.”
” Yes,” answered the General, “I regard Sheridan as not only one of the great soldiers of our war, but one of the great soldiers of the world — as a man who is fit for the highest commands. No better general ever lived than Sheridan.”
“I observed,” said the prince, ” that he had a wonderfully quick eye. On one occasion, I remember, the Emperor and his staff took up a position to observe a battle. The Emperor himself was never near enough to the front, was always impatient to be as near the fighting as possible. ‘ Well,’ said Sheridan to me, as we rode along, ‘ we shall never stay here, the enemy will in a short time make this so untenable that we shall all be leaving in a hurry. Then while the men are advancing they will see us retreating.’ Sure enough, in an hour or so the cannon shot began to plunge this way and that way, and we saw we must leave. It was difficult to move the Emperor, however; but we all had to go, and,” said the prince, with a hearty laugh, “we went rapidly. Sheridan had seen it from the beginning. I wish I had so quick an eye.”
When Grant met Bismarck, Wilhelm I had just been shot — and so conversation turned to the Global War on Anarchism, as Fouché wryly calls it:
The General answered that the influence which aimed at the Emperor’s life was an influence that would destroy all government, all order, all society, republics and empires.“In America,” said General Grant, ” some of our people are, as I see from the papers, anxious about it. There is only one way to deal with it, and that is by the severest methods. I don’t see why a man who commits a crime like this, a crime that not only aims at an old man’s life, a ruler’s life, but shocks the world, should not meet with the severest punishment. In fact,” continued the General, “although at home there is a strong sentiment against the death penalty, and it is a sentiment which one naturally respects, I am not sure but it should be made more severe rather than less severe. Something is due to the offended as well as the offender, especially where the offended is slain.”
“That,” said the prince, ” is entirely my view. My convictions are so strong that I resigned the government of Alsace because I was required to commute sentences of capital nature. I could not do it in justice to my conscience. You see, this kind old gentleman, that Emperor whom these very people have tried to kill, is so gentle that he will never confirm a death sentence. Can you think of anything so strange that a sovereign whose tenderness of heart has practically abolished the death punishment should be the victim of assassination, or attempted assassination ? That is the fact. Well, I have never agreed with the Emperor on this point, and in Alsace, when I found that as chancellor I had to approve all commutations of the death sentence, I resigned. In Prussia that is the work of the Minister of Justice; in Alsace it devolved upon me. I felt, as the French say, that something was due to justice, and if crimes like these are rampant they must be severely punished.”
“All you can do with such people,” said the General quietly, “is to kill them.”
“Precisely so,” answered the prince.