Amid this Grant mania, many newspaper readers noted that in reports of the final day’s fighting at Fort Donelson, Grant was holding a cigar—the one he received from Foote. Until that point, Grant had been primarily a pipe smoker. Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”48 Before long, Grant smoked eighteen to twenty cigars a day and they became an inescapable part of his persona.
