Willard's Hotel, Washington, Sept. 7, 1859.
Dear SIR: On
arriving here night before last I had the pleasure to receive from Mr. Richard
Smith your two favors of the 15th and 20th of August, and Major Buell, with
whom I have not been able to meet until this morning at breakfast, has shown me
yours to him of the 4th inst. which he was in the act of opening when I joined
him, and from which he has allowed me to take a memorandum of the dates of your
proposed movements. The information contained in your letter to Buell has been
of considerable relief to me, for whilst it would be very gratifying to me to
meet with you I did not see any good commensurate with the expense, time, risk,
and trouble to yourself, to result from your coming all the way here merely to
confer with me when it was not in my power to specify any particular day when I
would be in the city, as the business which brings me here lies down in
Virginia, whither I go tomorrow morning, if the violent cold under which I am
now suffering shall permit, and the consummation of it is contingent on the
action of a half dozen others than myself.
I had desired very much, if it suited your convenience, that
you could visit and see into the interior life of the school at Lexington,
Virginia, where everything would be shown to you with the most cordial
frankness by Col. Smith, who has taken the warmest and most earnest interest in
our effort, and who writes to me of you, sir, in very high terms of
congratulatory appreciation, and where one of your classmates, Major Gilham, is
a member of the Academic Board.
In the event that this will not be practicable to you, as I
infer from the programme laid down in your note to Major Buell it will not be,
I shall write to Col. Smith asking him to give us all necessary information of
details not contained in the “Rules and Regulations” the preparation of the
code of which for our school is confined to the joint action of “the faculty”
and “A Committee consisting of Messrs. Manning, Graham, and Whittington.” I
would rather have had the Board adopt for the present the code of the Virginia
school, because under the Governor's resolution, about which he did not confer
with me beforehand, it cannot well be done until on or about the 1st of
January, when it ought to be done in advance. I do not see therefore that we
can do otherwise than adopt, at first, the code of that school. I have no
apprehension but that whatever you, Mr. Manning and myself may agree upon, will
be acceptable to all the rest.
In regard to “furnishing” the building there will not be
much trouble. My idea will be for each cadet to furnish his own requisites in
the way of room furniture, as at West Point. There will then be nothing to
furnish but the class-rooms, the kitchen and mess hall as I believe I mentioned
to you before, the statement in the Governor's advertisement that “furnished
apartments would be provided in the building for the professors,” was an error
of our not very clear-headed secretary. The intention of the Board was simply
to apprize all interested that there were no separate dwellings for the
professors. . .
I met with Mr. F. W. Smith1 in Richmond and
travelled with him to this place. He is about sailing for Europe to be back the
1st of December. All my anticipations of him fully realized. I cannot close
without mentioning that in a visit to the convent in Georgetown yesterday my
sister (Mary Bernard) poured out her joy on learning (to do which she enquired
with great eagerness) that the superintendent of our school was the husband of
that “one of all the girls who have passed through our hands here that I
believed I loved best and was the most deeply interested in.”2
In regard to “authority and control,” although it is not yet
exactly so, I hope the next session of the legislature will place our school on
precisely the same footing as the Virginia school, making the superintendent
the commanding officer of the corps of cadets, giving to him and the other
members of the Academic Board, rank in the State's military organization.
_______________
1 The newly elected commandant of cadets and
professor of chemistry. — Ed.
2 Mrs. Sherman was educated in a Georgetown,
D.C., convent in which General Graham's sister was a teacher and later Mother
Superior. — Ed.
SOURCE: Walter L. Fleming, Editor, General W.T.
Sherman as College President, p. 34-7
