Personal Recollections of Distinguished Generals

by William Franklin Gore Shanks

The faith of Howard in the principles which he advocated was sublime. I knew of but one other who began the war with loftier purposes of universal good, purer motives of right, justice, and liberty, or truer ideas of the nature of the struggle as a crusade against slavery and ignorance, and he was not a general—only a major of infantry, though a brilliant "first section" graduate at West Point, but worthy ten times over of greater rank than the army could grant. Nothing could have been more beautiful than the firm faith which William H. Sidell felt from the first in the final triumph of the right, not merely in restoring the country to its former glory, unity, and strength, but in restoring and rejuvenating it, purified of that which was at once its weakness and its shame. It is somewhat of a digression to run off from Howard in this manner to speak of Major Sidell, but every reader who knew the man will think it pardonable. Sidell was a man of firm convictions, and hence a man of great influence. It used to seem to me that he was intended for the single purpose of making up other people's minds, and deciding for his acquaintances what was right and what wrong. He possessed a singularly effective, epigrammatical style of conversation, and his generally very original ideas were always expressed with great force and vigor. When he got hold of a great idea, he would talk it at you without cessation, repeating it as frequently as he found a hearer, and persist with something of the manner of those religious preachers who pride themselves on "preaching in season and out of season" until conviction followed. His ideas possessed not only value, but his language had a stamp as coinage has, and both ideas and language passed current. His ideas, oft repeated, thoroughly inculcated, found wide circulation in the army with which he served, and it was often amusing to hear his language repeated in places where they were least expected, and by persons who were never suspected of possessing minds capable of retaining grand ideas, or hearts true enough to comprehend great principles. His ideas were traceable in the language of the soldiers, relieved and often illustrated by the happy use of their familiar, commonplace "slang." They got strangely mixed up in the orders of commanding generals with whom he served, and I have even detected Sidell's undeniable stamp in one of the Executive documents.

The great charm of the man was the effective style in which he advocated the firm convictions of his mind, and expressed the deep sympathies of his nature; and no man could rise from a conversation on the topics to which his mind naturally reverted, whenever he found a willing listener, without feeling the better for it, and with a better opinion of humanity in general. If he had a fault, it was that he conceived too much. His was

"A vigorous, various, versatile mind,"

which grasped a subject as if to struggle with it, and pursued an idea "to the death." It was, however, only his convictions in regard to great principles that he inculcated and forced upon others. He originated so much that he executed too little, and never gave practical effect to two or three of his mechanical inventions which have made fortunes for more practical and more shallow men. Sidell was in some respects the only counterpart I ever met to Sherman, and the parallel between them only held good with regard to their head work. They conceived equally, but Sherman executed most.

General Howard possessed these same attributes of firm, honest conviction, and the same fixedness of principles which distinguished Sidell. His moral honesty won him more admiration than his speeches or his abilities as a soldier; for, though energetic and persevering in his administration as a commander, and generally successful in his military efforts, his reputation in the army was more that of the Christian gentleman than of the great soldier. It was through the constant observation of his Christian duties that he won the title of the "Havelock of the war" and the reputation of an exemplar. He was strictly temperate, never imbibing intoxicating drinks, never profane, and always religious. There was not a great excess of religion in the army, particularly among the general officers, and Howard therefore became a prominent example, the more particularly as religion was looked upon by a great majority of the men only to be ridiculed. There was very little of religious feeling among the men of the army, save among those in the hospital. The hospital was the church of the camp, and there was little religious fervor among our veterans which did not date from the hospital. The soldier in the hospital was another being from the soldier in camp. He abandoned his bad habits when he lost his health or received his wound, and grew serious as he grew sick. The lion of the camp was invariably the lamb of the hospital. The almost universal habit of swearing in camp was abandoned in the hospital; profanity gave place to prayer, and the sick veteran became meek, talked in soft tones, and never failed to thank you for the smallest kindnesses where before he had laughed at them. I have often seen the convalescents gather in the sunshine to sing familiar hymns, and generally the wildest in camp were the most earnest in these religious exercises.

When Howard took command of the Army of the Tennessee, an old officer remarked that there was at last one chaplain in it. That particular army had not paid much attention to religion, believing, like Sherman, that crackers and meat were more necessary; and at first the men displayed but little respect for the "intruder from the Potomac," as much, indeed, from the fact that he came from the Potomac army as that he was what the men called "nothing but a parson." A very short time after taking command of this army, Howard gave orders that the batteries of his command, then in position besieging Atlanta, should not fire on the enemy on the Sabbath, unless it became absolutely necessary. The enemy soon heard of this order, and generally busied themselves on the Sabbath in casemating their guns and otherwise strengthening their works in Howard's front, exposing themselves with impunity, satisfied that Howard's men would keep the Sabbath holy, though doing so under compulsion. The soldiers did not like this forced silence, declaring that "it wasn't Grant's nor Sherman's way, nor Black Jack's (Logan) neither;" and one of the general officers went so far as to say that "a man who neglected his duty because it happened to be Sunday was doubtless a Christian, but not much of a soldier." The troops soon learned, however, that Howard was also a soldier; and when, a year afterward, he was relieved of the command by General Logan, he had won the love and admiration of his men.

General Howard would have liked to have been thought the representative man of the Army of the Tennessee, but there were no points of resemblance between him and the real representative man of that army. The Western soldiers were of a peculiar race, and under Grant the Army of the Tennessee, the representative army of the West, was drilled, marched, and fought into a peculiar type of an army. Sherman took command of it subsequently, and gave it many peculiarities, not all of which were creditable; but neither Grant nor Sherman were its representatives. Howard endeavored to reform the army morally and in its discipline, which even under Grant had been bad, and under Sherman very lax indeed, but failed to impart to it as a body any of the qualities which shone so prominently in his character. The real representative man of that remarkable army was General John A. Logan, of Illinois.

JOHN A. LOGAN.