To his personal friends he was always generous and thoughtful, sending them many presents, defending them from misrepresentation, and helping them in their chosen careers. By means of his influence and tact he procured the release of an indiscreet person who had talked himself into McDowell's College prison as a suspected enemy to the government. Giving to others seemed a trait in Eads's character which afforded him an intense pleasure; and though a man of great dignity, he used with his intimate friends a charming playfulness and affection. He could be extremely mild in correcting faults; and while he was inclined to bear with others, he could be stern. His manners were rather those one expects in a European gentleman of leisure and high breeding, than in a former steamboat clerk and a man who had worked hard most of his life. His hospitality was princely. In his large house in the suburbs of Saint Louis he received not only the young friends of his five daughters and his own friends, but also officers of the river fleet and of the army, officers sent west on inspection duty, and foreign officers following the course of the war and of the improvements in gunboat building.
His mind was as active as his heart was generous, and the course of his life mirrored that activity. Now he was at home, now in Washington, now at Cairo visiting the gunboats to see how they worked under fire. In Washington he was busy with plans and projects. An intimate associate said of him in his later life that he was always inventing some new gun or gun-carriage; and we may be sure that if he ever was doing so, he was in those war times. Besides inventing his own, he was also busy examining Ericsson's inventions, in making improvements on them, in applying steam in novel ways to the working of artillery and to the rotating and raising of turrets; in sending models of his inventions here and there, at home and abroad, to Germany, where the Prussian minister, a friend with whom he often dined, "wished they could get some of his boats on the Rhine;" having his turrets explained at a Russian dinner in New York or Washington; and receiving from the Navy Department an appointment as special agent to visit the navy yards in Europe. At home he was just as busy. With his house so full of company, he nevertheless found time somewhere for solid reading apart from his work--the Attorney-General sent him Cicero's letters, and he lent the Attorney-General King Alfred's works. There is a curious interest in knowing what two men so engrossed, and upon such necessary duties, were reading at such a time. While he was building the second batch of gunboats, he wrote to Bates in a personal letter that he believed he had the most complete and convenient works in the country for iron boat-building; that there and in other places he had as many as seventy blacksmith fires at work for him, and that his men were all sheltered from sun and rain. After those boats were finished, he went on planning others, and we have a letter from Farragut in which the admiral asks if some of them are not for his use at Mobile.