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[63] their vessels on this service of danger. Volunteers were therefore called for from the army, men who had any experience in river navigagation. “Captains, pilots, mates, engineers, and deck-hands, enough presented themselves,” says Grant, “to take five times the number of vessels we were moving.” The resource and rapidity shown by the troops in the repair of railroads wrecked by the enemy were marvellous. In Sherman's Atlanta campaign, the Confederate cavalry lurking in his rear to burn bridges and obstruct his communications had become so disgusted at hearing trains go whistling by, within a few hours after a bridge had been burned, that they proposed to try blowing up some of the tunnels. One of them said on this: “No use, boys; old Sherman carries duplicate tunnels with him, and will replace them as fast as you can blow them up; better save your powder!” But a leader to use these capable and intelligent forces, to use all the vast resources of the North, was needed, a leader wise, cool, firm, bold, persevering, and at the same time, as Cardinal Mazarin says, heureux; and such a leader the United States found in General Grant. He concludes his Memoirs by some advice to his own country and some remarks on ours.
Boston. De Wolfe, Fiske &c Co. 361 and 365 Washington Street. 1888.
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