Abraham Lincoln, when describing his fighting general to a friend remarked that, “He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe he had been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here.”

“Grant is the first [true] general I have had”, Lincoln continued, “You know how it’s been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn’t so with Grant. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me. He doesn’t ask impossibilities of me, and he’s the first general I’ve had that didn’t.”

As President, Ulysses S. Grant, after a hard day’s work at The White House, would go over to the Willard Hotel to relax and smoke a cigar or two in the hotel lobby.

Inaccessible while in the executive office, the denizens of D.C., eager to gain the favor of the president, soon discovered that they might catch the elusive man in the lobby. It was there that President, who valued his solitude, would coin the phase we all know well today – he labeled the fussy crowd “Lobbyist’s.