Christopher Colon Augur, one of the commanders of the Department of Washington, and major-general of volunteers, was the next in grade.

Franklin Gardner, a native of New York, and an appointee from the State of Iowa, graduated seventeenth in General Grant's class. At the time of the Rebellion he deserted the cause of the United States and joined the Confederates. He was disgracefully dropped from the rolls of the United States army, on May 7, 1861, became a majorgeneral in the Confederate service, and surrendered his garrison at Port Hudson, July 9, 1863, through the reduction of Vicksburg by his junior graduate, U. S. Grant.

Lieutenant George Stevens, who was drowned in the passage of the Rio Grande, May 18, 1846, was the next graduaté.

The nineteenth graduate was Edmund B. Holloway, of Kentucky, who obtained a brevet at Contreras, and was a captain of infantry in the United States regular army at the commencement of the Rebellion. Although his State remained in the Union, he threw up his commission on May 14, 1861, and joined the Confederates.

The graduate that immediately preceded General Grant was Lieutenant Lewis Neill, who died on January 13, 1850, while in service at Fort Croghan, Texas.

GENERAL U. S. GRANT was the next or twenty-first graduate.

Joseph H. Potter, of New Hampshire, graduated next after the hero of Vicksburg. During the War of the Rebellion he became a colonel of volunteers, retaining his rank as captain in the regular army.

Lieutenant Robert Hazlitt, who was killed in the storming of Monterey, Sept. 21, 1846, and Lieutenant Edwin Howe, who died while in service at Fort Leavenworth, March 31, 1850, were the next two graduates.

Lafayette Boyer Wood, of Virginia, was the twentyfifth graduate. He is no longer connected with the service, having resigned several years before the civil war.

The next graduate was Charles S. Hamilton, who for some time commanded, as major-general of volunteers, a district under General Grant.

Captain William K. Van Bokkelen, of New York, who was cashiered for rebel proclivities, on May 8, 1861, was the next graduate, and was followed by Alfred St. Amand Crozet, of New York, who had resigned the service several years before the breaking out of the civil war, and Lieutenant Charles E. James, who died at Sonoma, Cal., on June 8, 1849.

The thirtieth graduate was the gallant General Frederick Steele, who participated in the Vicksburg and Mississippi campaigns, as division and corps commander under General Grant, and afterward commanded the Army of Arkansas.

The next graduate was Captain Henry R. Selden, of Vermont, and of the Fifth U. S. Infantry.

General Rufus Ingalls, quartermaster-general of the Army of the Potomac, graduated No. 32.

Major Frederick T. Dent, of the Fourth U. S. Infantry, and Major J. C. McFerran, of the Quartermaster's Department, were the next two graduates.

The thirty-fifth graduate was General Henry Moses Judah, who commanded a division of the Twenty-Third Army Corps during its operations after the Confederate cavalry general, John H. Morgan, and in East Tennessee, during the fall of 1863.

The remaining four graduates were Norman Elting, who resigned the service October 29, 1846; Cave J. Couts, who was a member of the State Constitutional Convention

of California during the year 1849; Charles G. Merchant, of New York; and George C. McClelland, of Pennsylvania, no one of whom was at this time connected with the United States Service.

The admirers of General Grant will take no little interest in examining the above list and tracing the career of the twenty-first graduate in his outstripping all his seniors in grade. Having surmounted all difficulties, he commanded, at the close of the war, a larger force and a greater extent of territory than all of his thirty-eight classmates put together, and had risen higher in the military scale than any in his class, notwithstanding the fact that he showed at West Point none of that brilliancy and dash which is thought so much of by collegiates.

Henry Coppée, Esq., who was with young Grant for two years, at West Point Academy, gives the following account of him while there:

"I remember him as a plain, common-sense, straightforward youth; quiet, rather of the old-head-on-youngshoulders order; shunning notoriety; quite contented, while others were grumbling; taking to his military duties in a very business-like manner; not a prominent man in the corps, but respected by all, and very popular with his friends. His sobriquet of Uncle Sam was given to him there, where every good fellow has a nickname, from these very qualities; indeed, he was a very uncle-like sort of a youth. He was then and always an excellent horseman, and his picture rises before me'as I write, in the old, torn coat, obsolescent leather gig-top, loose riding pantaloons, with spurs buckled over them, going with his clanking sabre to the drill hall. He exhibited but little enthusiasm in anything; his best standing was in the mathematical branches, and their application to tactics and military engineering.

"If we again dwell upon the fact that no one, even of his most intimate friends, dreamed of a great future for him, it is to add that, looking back now, we must confess that the possession of many excellent qualities, and the entire absence of all low and mean ones, establish a logical sequence from first to last, and illustrate, in a novel manner, the poet's fancy about

'The baby figures of the giant mass

Of things to come at large.'"

CHAPTER III.

ENTERS THE ARMY-THE MEXICAN WAR.

ON leaving West Point Grant entered the United States army as a brevet second lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry -the date at which this brevet rank was awarded to him was that of the succeeding day to his graduation, viz.: July 1, 1843. Lieutenant Grant's regiment was at this time stationed on the frontier in Missouri and Missouri Territory, among the Indians who were at that time very annoying and dangerous to the early settlers of that region. He remained nearly two years, when in 1845 he was ordered, with his regiment, to Corpus Christi, Texas, where United States troops were gathering under command of General Taylor.

Corpus Christi was an important town on the Texas shore, and was taken possession of by the Americans as a base of operations. While stationed here Grant received his commission as full second lieutenant of infantry. The commission was dated September 30, 1845, and was made out to fill a vacancy in the Second U. S. Infantry. Having become so attached to the officers and men of the Fourth, a request was forwarded to Washington to allow him to remain with his old company, and in the following November he received a commission appointing him a full second lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry.

Some time before the declaration by Congress of war with Mexico, the struggle commenced in Texas. The bill