, and that this
ignorance was the only thing which could palliate their action.
Whether they meant it or not, their action was mutinous. The
responsibility for the movement of the army was with me, and whilst
I should be inclined to confer very freely with my principal
subordinates and explain my purposes, I should call no councils of
war, and submit nothing to vote till I felt incompetent to decide
for myself. If they apologized for their conduct and showed
earnestness in military obedience to orders, what they had now said
would be overlooked, but on any recurrence of cause for complaint I
should enforce my power by the arrest of the offender at once. I
dismissed them with this, and immediately sent out the formal orders
through my adjutant-general to march early next morning. Before they
slept one of the three had come to me with earnest apology for his
part in the matter, and a short time made them all as subordinate as
I could wish. The incident could not have occurred in the brigade
which had been under my command at Camp Dennison, and was a not
unnatural result of the sudden assembling of inexperienced men under
a brigade commander of whom they knew nothing except that at the
beginning of the war he was a civilian like themselves. These very
men afterward became devoted followers, and some of them life-long
friends. It was part of their military education as well as mine. If
I had been noisy and blustering in my intercourse with them at the
beginning, and had done what seemed to be regarded as the
"regulation" amount of cursing and swearing, they would probably
have given me credit for military aptitude at least; but a
systematic adherence to a quiet and undemonstrative manner evidently
told against me, at first, in their opinion. Through my army life I
met more or less of the same conduct when assigned to a new command;
but when men learned that discipline would be inevitably enforced,
and that it was as necessary to obey a quiet order as one emphasized
by expletives, and especially when they had been a little under
fire, there was no more trouble. Indeed, I was impressed with the
fact that after this acquaintance was once made, my chief
embarrassment in discipline was that an intimation of
dissatisfaction on my part would cause deeper chagrin and more
evident pain than I intended or wished.

The same march enabled me to make the acquaintance of another army
"institution,"--the newspaper correspondent. We were