CHAPTER VI

IN COMMAND

GRANT had been set, a month before, to muster in the regiment now put under his command, a raw and ragged lot of country boys, camped near Mattoon, their former colonel, chosen by themselves by reason of his warlike aspect, a former Costa Rican filibuster with a propensity for bowie knives and whiskey, and a way of making daily harangues to his helpless men, dragging his sentries sometimes from their posts for nightly orgies. When it came to serving under him in war, the officers objected, and remembering the quietly effective soldier who had taught them how to drill they asked the Governor to give them Grant. That was how Grant came by his first regiment.

The new commander had no uniform, although he bought one later with three hundred dollars which he borrowed from a friend. His rusty clothes and stooping shoulders contrasted queerly with the military strut of some of the militia colonels. He tells how, when he went to take command, Logan and McGlernand, two Democratic Congressmen, both later to be generals of volunteers, went with him to inspire

the backward regiment with military fervor; and he relates how Logan's speech aroused his men to such a pitch that "they would have volunteered to remain in the army as long as an enemy of the country continued to bear arms against it." But he neglects to say that after the first burst of oratory, when McClernand presented him as the new colonel, and the men, looking for another thrill, called out, "Grant! Grant!" he simply said, "Go to your quarters," in the clear, carrying, inevitable voice which years before had caught the ears of loiterers on the Bethel Green and which would soon have its incisive way on more tumultuous fields. Nor does he tell how his new regiment, for the first time catching the inflection of control, went to their quarters silently, under the unaccustomed spell.

He drilled and disciplined them for a month. Ordered to the Missouri line, where secession was still struggling for the border State, he marched his men across the country, so as to teach them how, instead of waiting for a train.

His six weeks in Missouri gave him no chance for much of anything, but to his father he confides that his services with the regiment have been "highly satisfactory to me. I took it in a very disorganized, demoralized, and insubordinate condition and have worked it up to a reputation equal to

the best, and, I believe, with the good-will of all the officers and all the men. Hearing that I was likely to be promoted, the officers with great unanimity have requested to be attached to my command. This I don't want you to read to others, for I very much dislike speaking of myself," - a disagreeable restraint for Jesse, whose paternal pride was just beginning to revive.

An incident illuminating in the naïveté with which he tells it: At Mexico, Missouri, where he encamped for several weeks, he had his earliest opportunity to exercise his regiment in battalion drill. "I had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my graduation... had not been at a battalion drill since 1846. The arms had been changed and Hardee's tactics had been adopted. I got a copy of tactics and studied one lesson, intending to confine the exercise of the first day to the commands I thus learned. I do not believe that the officers of the regiment ever discovered that I had never studied the tactics that I used,"

an instance, slight it may be, of the saving common sense which served him all his life for genius. "I never maneuver," he said to Meade before the battle of the Wilderness. "My only points of doubt were as to your knowledge of sound strategy and of books of science and history," Sherman wrote him in a memorable letter, "but I confess your common sense

seems to have supplied all this." And after he had gained his fame he said to a young officer, who would have talked to him of Jomini, that he had never paid much attention to that authority on military strategy. "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."

In his meager library there were no books on war, and he never seemed to care about the strategy of the great generals of history. To him the Civil War with every campaign in it was a problem by itself. His only purpose was to wrest success out of conditions placed before him, with such weapons as were nearest to his hand. The game of war had no attraction for him. "You ask if I should not like to go in the regular army," he writes his father, just after being made a colonel. "I should not. I want to bring my children up to useful employment and in the army the chance is poor."

Another story helps to explain a trait which was of service to him through his life. The first serious task to which his regiment was put was to disperse a band of troops under a guerrilla officer who had become a terror in that part of the State. "As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris's camp and possibly

find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there, and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before, but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event until the close of the war I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable."

It was his first experience in independent and responsible command and so, according to his own interpretation, he was dubious of the result. Like Grant's other lessons, this was one which he had to learn only once. He never was concerned about the opposition; considered only what he had to do himself. "When I go into battle," Sherman said years