“I expected to see him all covered with gold lace and other fixin's,” said one.
“He looks as if he would stay with 'em till somebody cried enough.”
“He's got good qualities, anyway,” remarked Taylor.
“How can you tell?”
“Because he smokes fine cigars, and rides a good hoss. I got a smell of that cigar as he cantered by to see what was going on in front of the second corps. I think—”
The discussion was cut short by another attempt of the Johnnies to hustle us back from the position held by our brigade. We protested so vigorously that the rebels retreated after making three or four dashes against our advance squadrons. It was warm work in the Wilderness. One of our boys exclaimed:
“If any of us get out of this Wilderness alive, our chances will be good to see the end of the Southern Confederacy.”
“Yea, verily,” groaned a corporal who had been shot in the arm.
That Grant had no suspicion of being in a tight box, as the rebel sympathizers at the North declared he was, is shown by the fact that at the very moment when his defamers asserted he was so badly crippled that had Lee attacked the Union army Grant's forces would have been destroyed, the lieutenant-general was so much on the aggressive that he was marching to renew the battle at Spottsylvania, and felt able to spare Sheridan and his splendid cavalry corps for a raid on Lee's communications.
We saw Grant again when we rejoined the army; at Cold Harbor, on the march to the south side of the James several times, and during the assaults in front of Petersburg. While in winter quarters we saw the lieutenant-general often at City Point and along the line, and the more we saw of him the higher he rose in our estimation. Then came the campaign of 1865, ending with the surrender of the rebel army at Appomattox. Grant was a modest officer, not given to display, but when the Army of the Potomac awoke to the fact that Lee's army was in the “last ditch,” then, and not till then, did the soldiers begin to appreciate the true greatness of the commander-in-chief.