Washington City, March 30, 1863.
C. A. Dana, Esq., Memphis, Tenn., via Cairo:
Your telegrams have been received, and although the information has been meager and unsatisfactory, I am conscious that arises from no fault of yours. You will proceed to General Grant's headquarters, or wherever you may be best able to accomplish the purposes designated by this department. You will consider your movements to be governed by your own discretion, without any restriction.
Edwin M. Stanton,
Secretary of War.
As soon after receiving his telegram as I could get a boat I left Memphis for Milliken's Bend, where General Grant had his headquarters. I reached there at noon on April 6th.
The Mississippi at Milliken's Bend was a mile wide, and the sight as we came down the river by boat was most imposing. Grant's big army was stretched up and down the river bank over the plantations, its white tents affording a new decoration to the natural magnificence of the broad plains. These plains, which stretch far back from the river, were divided into rich and old plantations by blooming hedges of rose and Osage orange, the mansions of the owners being inclosed in roses, myrtles, magnolias, oaks, and every other sort of beautiful and noble trees. The negroes whose work made all this wealth and magnificence were gone, and there was nothing growing in the fields.
For some days after my arrival I lived in a steamboat tied up to the shore, for though my tent was pitched and ready, I was not able to get a mattress and pillow. From the deck of the steamer I saw in those days many a wonderful and to me novel sight. One I remember still. I was standing out on the upper deck with a group of officers, when we saw far away, close to the other shore of the river, a long line of something white floating in the water. We thought it was foam, but it was too long and white, and that it was cotton which had been thrown into the river, but it was too straight and regular. Presently we heard a gun fired, then another, and then we saw it was an enormous flock of swans. They arose from the water one after the other, and sailed away up the river in long, curving, silver lines, bending and floating almost like clouds, and finally disappearing high up in the air above the green woods on the Mississippi shore. I suppose there were a thousand of them.
I had not been long at Milliken's Bend before I was on friendly terms with all the generals, big and little, and one or two of them I found were very rare men. Sherman especially impressed me as a man of genius and of the widest intellectual acquisitions. Every day I rode in one direction or another with an officer, inspecting the operations going on. From what I saw on my rides over the country I got a new insight into slavery, which made me no more a friend to that institution than I was before. I had seen slavery in Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri, but it was not till I saw these great Louisiana plantations with all their apparatus for living and working that I really felt the aristocratic nature of the institution, and the infernal baseness of that aristocracy. Every day my conviction was intensified that the territorial and political integrity of the nation must be preserved at all costs, no matter how long it took; that it was better to keep up the existing war as long as was necessary, rather than to make arrangement for indefinite wars hereafter and for other disruptions; that we must have it out then, and settle forever the question, so that our children would be able to attend to other matters. For my own part, I preferred one nation and one country, with a military government afterward, if such should follow, rather than two or three nations and countries with the semblance of the old Constitution in each of them, ending in wars and despotisms everywhere.
As soon as I arrived at Milliken's Bend, on April 6th, I had hunted up Grant and explained my mission. He received me cordially. Indeed, I think Grant was always glad to have me with his army. He did not like letter writing, and my daily dispatches to Mr. Stanton relieved him from the necessity of describing every day what was going on in the army. From the first neither he nor any of his staff or corps commanders evinced any unwillingness to show me the inside of things. In this first interview at Milliken's Bend, for instance, Grant explained to me so fully his new plan of campaign—for there was now but one—that by three o'clock I was able to send an outline of it to Mr. Stanton. From that time I saw and knew all the interior operations of that toughest of tough jobs, the reopening of the Mississippi.