March 29, 1865
This has been a day
of manoeuvre and not much fighting. To-morrow may see something more serious.
It seems like old times to be once more writing on my knee and sitting in a
tent without a board floor. I prefer it; there is novelty in seeing a new bit
of country. Yesterday we had an interesting trip to City Point. General Meade
said to me, to my great surprise: “I am going down to-morrow to see Sherman!”
Which, as I supposed Sherman to be at that moment somewhere near Goldsboro’,
seemed a rather preposterous idea! At an early hour we got to Grant's
Headquarters and found le monde not yet up. Soon, however, they began to
peer out of their log houses and General Meade marched in to visit the great
Mogul. As I was looking in that direction, there suddenly issued from the house
a tall figure who jerked himself forward, pulled suddenly up, and regarded the
landscape with an inquisitive and very wrinkled expression. This was the redoubtable
Sherman himself. He is a very remarkable-looking man, such as could not be
grown out of America — the concentrated quintessence of Yankeedom. He is tall,
spare, and sinewy, with a very long neck, and a big head at the end of the
same. The said big head is a most unusual combination. I mean that, when a man
is spare, with a high forehead, he usually has a contracted back to his head;
but Sherman has a swelling “fighting” back to his head, and all his
features express determination, particularly the mouth, which is wide and
straight, with lips that shut tightly together. He is a very homely man, with a
regular nest of wrinkles in his face, which play and twist as he eagerly talks
on each subject; but his expression is pleasant and kindly. But he believes in
hard war. I heard him say: “Columbia! — pretty much all burned; and burned good!”
There too was “little Phil Sheridan," scarce five feet high, with his
sun-browned face and sailor air. I saw Sherman, Grant, Meade, and Sheridan, all
together. A thing to speak of in after years!
SOURCE: George R. Agassiz, Editor, Meade’s
Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness
to Appomattox, p. 326-7
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