MY EVENING WITH GRANT

William H. Smith’s storied career in journalism began in 1858, when, at age 18, he became a cub reporter for the Daily Evening Atlas, a short-lived Indianapolis newspaper. The following year he found himself covering presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln as he delivered a speech in Indianapolis that was all but lost to history until an employee of the Indiana State Library stumbled on Smith’s account some 70 years later. Smith voted for Lincoln in 1860, and in 1861, following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, he joined the 11th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which was mustered into the Union army, and went on to serve under Major General Lew Wallace.

With the end of the Civil War, Smith returned to journalism, working for two other newspapers in Indianapolis and, later, as a Washington correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. A Washington correspondent, Smith once observed, “was given full rein and could throw his personality into his writings without fear of the blue pencil in the home office.” Smith also found time to write a half dozen books, including a two-volume history of his home state of Indiana, a history of the Cabinet of the United States, and a collection of biographical sketches of speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives.

By the 1920s Smith had retired from daily reporting, but he kept active as a frequent contributor to the Washington Post. In one of his pieces for the newspaper, reprinted