IUKA, Miss., October
24, 1863.
. . . I have had a pretty bad cold for the past two days and
am delayed here by bad breaks on the Railroad ahead. The Tennessee is also
swollen, and I expect all sorts of trouble in getting over, unless boats are
sent up the Tennessee. We have had some fighting ahead with the enemy's
cavalry, a pretty formidable body sent ahead from Mississippi, the same
division that was in my front at Big Black and all of Wheeler's cavalry that
escaped from Tennessee; but I can engage their attention and then divert their
minds from the road which supplies Rosecrans' army. Grant I suppose now is at
Nashville, and will by his presence unite the army more in feeling than it
seems hitherto to have been. He is so unpretending and honest that a man must
be base who will not yield to him. The only possible danger is that some may
claim his successes hitherto have been the result of accident, but there too I
hope they will find themselves mistaken. I have telegraphic notice from Memphis
that he has assumed command of the Armies of the Cumberland, Ohio and
Tennessee, and that I am to command the latter. My desire has always been to
have a distinct compact command, as a Corps, but spite of my efforts I am
pushed into complicated places that others aspire to and which I wish they had.
But with Grant I will undertake anything in reason. . . .
I see your thoughts as mine dwell with poor Willy in his
grave. I do not, and you should not, reproach yourself a moment for any neglect
of him. He knew and felt every moment of his life our deep, earnest love for
him. The day he came on board the Atlantic1 I think I
observed that usual suppressed feeling of pride at having secured that gun. I
know I joked him about it and think he received it in his usual manner, and yet
at that moment he must have felt the seed of that disorder which proved so
fatal. He did not know it then, and we could not so quickly detect the
symptoms. . . . God knows and he knows that either of us, and hundreds of
others, would have died to save him. . . .
__________
1 The boat from Vicksburg to Memphis. See Memoirs,
I, 376.
SOURCES: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Editor, Home Letters of
General Sherman, p. 279-80. A full copy of this letter can
be found in the William
T Sherman Family papers (SHR), University of Notre Dame Archives
(UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556, Folder CSHR 2/07.
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