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

later, "I am always worrying about what the enemy is going to do. Grant never gives a damn!” 1

1 General James H. Wilson says that just before the march to the sea, Sherman said to him: "Wilson, I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does; I know more about organization, supply, and administration, and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell!" (Under the Old Flag, vol. 11, p. 17.)

CHAPTER VII

BRIGADIER-GENERAL

JOHN C. FREMONT, the "Pathfinder," major-general by reason of a reputation picturesquely gained, a dashing figure, futile in command, yet idolized beyond all other Northern men at the beginning of the war, was at the head of the Department of the West including Illinois, Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri, with quarters at St. Louis, which held the key to the strategical control of the Confederacy, the waters joining there within a radius of a hundred miles to form the great flow of the Mississippi, the sole effective channels for transportation of supplies and troops. McClellan was at Cincinnati. Scott was general-inchief at Washington and under him the regulars, McDowell, Meigs, and Rosecrans. Grant under Frémont, who had a scant conception of the strategical importance of his own command, was ordered from one place to another in Missouri, knocking his regiment into shape, doing police duty at Ironton, Jefferson City, and Mexico, establishing order here and there; for Claiborne Jackson's State was desultory fighting ground by reason of the close division of the population between the sympathizers with the North

and South. Without formality and by consent, because he was the only educated soldier in the lot of recently created colonels, he found himself commander of an improvised brigade, and then one day in early August, 1861, his chaplain showed him a news paragraph that Lincoln had appointed him a brigadier. “It must be some of Washburne's work," he said.

Elihu B. Washburne, a "down East" Yankee, transplanted early to the West, had been the Congressman from the Galena District since 1852, one of the very earliest Free-Soilers or Republicans to get office, so that when his party gained control, with Lincoln at the head, he was a factor to be reckoned with. Shrewd, forceful, rangy, a fair type of the uncultured politician of his time, serving the public many years in Congress and as Minister to France, he is known chiefly now because Grant was his unknown neighbor at Galena when Lincoln called for troops. He saw Grant handle the Galena company, talked with him about the war and found him full of sense, gave him a note to Yates and kept an eye on him when he became a colonel. His unsought friendship was the nearest thing to “influence” Grant ever had, and Grant was right in guessing that the appointment was "some of Washburne's work."

When Congress met in August and Lincoln had to