General Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant

“ [395] shoot him this very day for desertion if you don't stop them.” Mr. Washburne now began to take in the situation, and led the woman to a seat, and tried to comfort her, while she began to tell how her young husband had been led, through his fondness for her, to desert in order to go home and see her, and how he had been captured and court-martialed, and was to be executed that day, and how she had heard of it only in time to reach headquarters that morning to plead for his life. By this time the general was up, and hearing from his sleeping-apartment an excited conversation in the front room, dressed hurriedly, and stepped upon the scene in time to hear the burden of the woman's story. The spectacle presented partook decidedly of the serio-comic. The dignified member of Congress was standing in his shirt-sleeves in front of the pleading woman, his face covered with lather, except the swath which had been made down his right cheek; the razor was uplifted in his hand, and the tears were starting out of his eyes as his sympathies began to be worked upon. The woman was screaming and gesticulating frantically, and was almost hysterical with grief. I appeared at the front door about the same time that the general entered from the rear, and it was hard to tell whether one ought to laugh or cry at the sight presented. The general now took a hand in the matter, convinced the woman that he was the commanding general, assured her that he would take steps at once to have her husband reprieved and pardoned, and sent her away rejoicing. His interposition saved the man's life just in the nick of time. He cracked many a joke with Mr. Washburne afterward about the figure he cut on the morning of the occurrence.

Sheridan had started out from Winchester on the 27th of February with nearly 10,000 cavalry. On March 5