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question, though
his father had been an Abolitionist and his wife had kept her two Negroes with
her all through her marriage. A proclamation he issued in Kentucky—"I have
nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its
aiders and abettors"— first attracted the attention of the government
which was having its troubles with generals who were also politicians. But it
was not until the Battle of Belmont that they began to see his fighting
qualities. Then the double capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, especially the
unconditional surrender note he sent to his old friend Buckner, made his name
known everywhere.
    This coming
great Battle of Corinth will be fought not more than a month from now. The
Rebels are massing & we are massing too — & soon I shall go down &
get our revenge for Bull Run. After that I’m sure to get a furlough & we
shall be together again. It seems so long. Martha, I give you fair warning now
— nothing but Unconditional Surrender, I propose to move immediately upon your
works. (For goodness sake don’t let anybody see this not even a peek.)
    It gave us confidence just to see Grant ride among us in his
rumpled private's blouse, looking calm and composed no matter what came up and
always smoking a cigar. (He'd smoked a pipe before. But after Donelson, people
sent him so many boxes of cigars he felt obliged to smoke them.) The soldiers
never put much stock in all the tales about him drinking and carousing, for we
saw him daily in the field. There may have been those little whiskey-lines around
his eyes, but they were there before the war. We knew that he had seen to it
himself that the whiskey would not get him this time, the way it had done eight
years before, and here was how he did it:
    He had an officer on his staff named Rawlins, a young hard-faced
man in his late twenties, dark complexioned with stiff black hair to match.
He'd been a lawyer in Galena, handling legal affairs for the Grant brothers'
leather store; that was how Grant met him. As soon as he made brigadier. Grant
sent for Rawlins and put him on his staff. Rawlins had a gruff manner with
everyone, the general included. Other staff officers said he was insubordinate
twenty times a day. That was what Grant wanted: someone to take him in hand if
he ever let up. I saw his bold, hard signature often on papers passing over my
desk— Jno A Rawlins —and you could tell, just by the
way he wrote it, he wouldn’t take fooling with. There was a saying in the army:
"If you hit Rawlins on the head, you’ll knock Grant's brains out,"
but that wasn’t true. He was not Grant's brains. He was Grant's conscience, and
he was a rough one.
    So that was the way it was. There had been flurries of snow
at first (the sunny South! we cried) but we were too busy clearing our camp
sites to think about marching, anyhow. Soon afterward the weather cleared, half
good days, half bad, and Sherman made a practice of sending us down the road
toward Corinth on conditioning marches with flankers out and a screen of
pickets, just the way it would be when we moved for keeps. It was fine
training. Occasionally there would be run-ins with Rebel cavalry, but they
would never stand and fight. We'd see them for a moment, gray figures on
scampering horses, with maybe a shot or two like hand-claps and a little pearly
gob of smoke coming up; then they would vanish. That was part of our training,
being shot at.
    It was during this period that Colonel Appier and I began to
fall out. He had a wild notion that all members of his command, cooks and
clerks and orderlies included, should not only be well-versed in the school of
the soldier, but also should take part in all the various tactical exercises.
That was all right for theory, perhaps, but of course when it came to putting
it into practice it didn’t work. In the first place they made poor soldiers and
in the second place it interfered with their regular duties and in the third
place it wasn’t