handed a telegram from the War Department, directing me to proceed at once to Tennessee and report to General George H. Thomas. I sought General Meade, and handing him the telegram, asked him what it meant? Expressing surprise, he said he "hardly knew what; was sorry to lose me, etc.; but it is a safe rule always to obey orders-especially when they are signed by Secretary Stanton!" And then he added, as a crumb of comfort (for I was reluctant to go West-all my friends were in the East): "It will likely lead to promotion, young man! George Thomas needs good officers out there!"

And so, shaking hands and kindly bidding me "goodbye," and "good luck to you!" he mounted his horse and rode to the front, while I, shaking hands with the staff and bidding everybody good-bye, within an hour took the cars at the nearest railroad station, with my horses and baggage, and before noon was back in Washington and en route to Nashville.

This seemed to me at the time a great misfortune— one of the most untoward events of my life—as if I was "banished to Botany Bay"—and I could not understand it. It caused me many a bitter hour, as I traveled westward. But in the end it made me full colonel, and brigadier general (by brevet), and on the whole was the luckiest thing that could have happened to me. It brought me into contact with Grant and Sherman and Thomas, and their great operations in the West, and broadened and helped me on many lines and in many ways ever afterward. And so,

"Hail and thanks" to Edwin M. Stanton, after all!

I never saw General Meade again. I did not get East again until August, 1865, and it so happened our paths never crossed each other afterward. The affair at Mine Run (November, 1863), above alluded to, though at first big with promise, ended in a fiasco, and we were soon back at Brandy Station and Warrenton, with the two

armies facing each other, like grim gladiators, on the line of the Rapidan again (December, 1863).1 Here the Army of the Potomac went into winter quarters, the weather getting to be bad, and Meade not knowing what better to do. Clearly Lee had outmaneuvered and outwitted him, and the campaign of 1863 closed with the honors in Lee's favor, notwithstanding his ghastly repulse at Gettysburg.

Nevertheless Meade was continued in command of the Army of the Potomac in 1864 and until the close of the war; and on the whole, history will declare he commanded it well. It is true, his command in 1864-65 was mainly nominal; for Grant was there himself, and in supreme command--overseeing and directing everything—with his eye and hand on everybody, and vowed to victory. But Meade must have shown high qualities, of both loyalty and generalship, or Grant surely would not have tolerated him even thus. He was certainly a great and able commander, if just a little too prudent at times; and as the conqueror of Gettysburg, and last commander of the Army of the Potomac, his fame is secure forever. To Pennsylvanians, at least, he will always be a hero and an idol; and to all others, a great and illustrious American, while time lasts or history endures.

1 How disappointing this was to Mr. Stanton is shown by his following brief telegram to General Butler, at Fortress Monroe, Dec. 2: "Meade is on the back track again without a fight."-War Records, vol. xxix, part ii, p. 537.

CHAPTER VII

GEORGE H. THOMAS

My next commander, and always greatly honored and esteemed, was General Thomas. Not Lorenzo Thomas, Adjutant General United States Army, but George H. Thomas, Major General United States Army, and Commander in Chief of the Army of the Cumberland. They differed considerably. The one was a Delawarian, and worthy of Delaware-the home of the whipping post still-smoothbore and narrow-gauge, a master of red tape. The other was a Virginian, and worthy of the home of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson— big-souled, broad-gauged, built on the plan of Plutarch's men. Large-framed, clear-headed, judgmatical, I think George H. Thomas resembled George Washington in body, brain, and soul more than any officer I met during the civil war. In some respects, indeed, he was an abler man than our American Fabius; but whether, on the whole, he could have swung things so well as George Washington did during our American Revolution may, of course, be doubted.

Though a Virginian, “native and to the manor born," and with the air and bearing of a real Virginian, Thomas, unlike Robert E. Lee, did not resign his commission and desert his colors when Virginia seceded (or tried to). He had graduated well at West Point, and served honorably and creditably in Mexico, and now stood loyally by the United States, though tempted much to accept a Virginia or Confederate commission. Doubtless the fact that he had married a New Yorker had something to do with it. A good wife always anchors