I had no personal relations with him before I was President, and knew nothing of him save by hearsay.

Soon after I became President, Senator Quay called upon me, told me he had known me very slightly, that he thought most men who claimed to be reformers were hypocrites, but that he deemed me sincere, that he thought conditions had become such that aggressive courage and honesty were necessary in order to remedy them, that he believed I intended to be a good and efficient President, and that to the best of his ability he would support me in it making my Administration a success.

He kept his word with absolute good faith.

He had been in the Civil War, and was a medal of honor man; and I think my having been in the Spanish War gave him at the outset a kindly feeling toward me.
He was also a very well-read man--I owe to him, for instance, my acquaintance with the writings of the Finnish novelist Topelius.

Not only did he support me on almost every public question in which I was most interested--including, I am convinced, every one on which he felt he conscientiously could do so--but he also at the time of his death gave a striking proof of his disinterested desire to render a service to certain poor people, and this under conditions in which not only would he never know if the service were rendered but in which he had no reason to expect that his part in it would ever be made known to any other man.
Quay was descended from a French voyageur who had some Indian blood in him.