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picked my way amongthem to the side of the road and sat on the roots of a tree. I was hungry, thirsty and worn out, and, worse than all, I didn’t know if my father were living or dead. No boy was ever more utterly wretched.”
    Then a man on horseback stopped and looked down at him, exclaiming, “Why, hello, is that really you?” It was one of his father’s officers, and Fred was greatly relieved to see him. “Dismounting, he proceeded to make me comfortable, putting down his saddle for a pillow, and advising me to go to sleep. This I did, but my sleep was broken by dreams of the horrors I had witnessed.”
    Later, the officer awoke him to tell him General Grant had arrived. Through exhausted eyes, Fred looked where the officer pointed. “About fifty yards off sat my father, drinking coffee from a tin cup. I went to him, and was greeted with an exclamation of surprise, as he supposed I was still on board the boat.”

    Though he commanded an army, Grant shared the same living conditions as ordinary soldiers.
    Grant was direct. “How did you get here?”
    “I walked,” Fred confessed, certain he was in trouble. But his father surprised him. “He looked at me for a moment, and then said, ‘I guess you will do.’ And there was no anger in his face. Maybe I was mistaken, but I half believed he was not sorry that I left the gunboat.”
    The next morning, as the army broke camp, he managed to find a horse to ride. It had no harness, but he was able to make one from some rope he found on the ground. All day he followed the troops. His father had gone somewhere else, and he was on his own. When the troops stopped for the night, he sought shelter at a house “where some officers were sleeping on a porch. I crawled in for a nap between two of them.” The next day when he joined his father, Grant noticed that Fred’s horse was lame. “Father, who was ever kind and thoughtful, insisted that I should take his mount.”
    During the next week, Grant was able to claim another victory, for Federal troops took possession of Grand Gulf when retreating Confederates abandoned it after their loss at Port Gibson. One day, while the Union army rested, Fred and a young orderly were exploring some of the countryside when they saw a house with a dozen horses tied up in front. Hoping for some glory, “we conceived the idea of capturing the mounts, and possibly the riders also, who were inside the house. Not until we had gone too far to retreat did the idea occur to us that the would-be captors might possibly become the captured.
    “It was with great relief that we saw a man wearing a blue uniform come out of the house, and we then discovered that the party we had proposed to capture was a detachment of Sherman’s signal corps.”

    A WEEK LATER , the army started moving northeast toward the state capital of Jackson, sixty miles away. Grant’s plan was to defeat Confederate general Joe Johnston, whose army occupied the city, so Johnston couldn’t help defend Vicksburg. Once Grant was in control of Jackson, he would march his army back west toward Vicksburg, taking advantage of the good road that stretched the forty miles between the two cities.
    The Mississippi weather slowed the troops as they moved toward Jackson. It rained every day, soaking the men as they trudged along muddy roads. Wagons got stuck, and fires were hard to start and harder to keepgoing. So his army could move more quickly, Grant had brought along only basic supplies. He had learned early on that food was abundant enough in the agricultural South that his army could live off the land-or at least it could while plantations were still intact and fully stocked. That was changing. But on the march to Jackson he expected the men to scavenge for food. Fred found meals with his father to be so irregular that “I, for one, did not propose to put up with such living, and I took my meals with the soldiers, who did a little foraging, and thereby set an infinitely better