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circumstances, General Sherman's order was to these officers both a cruel wrong and a gratuitous insult.
But if General Sherman in writing his final chapter had remembered the facts set forth in the opening of his book, he might have tempered his language in regard to staff service.
The Memoirs begin with the information that in the Spring of 1846 he was first-lieutenant in the Third Artillery, and present with his company at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.
In April of the same year he was detailed for recruiting service.
In June he was ordered to California with Company F of his regiment, and assigned to staff duty as quartermaster and commissary.
In March, 1847, he returned to company duty.
The next month (April) he was assigned as aid-de-camp to General Kearney.
In May General Kearney left California, and Lieutenant Sherman became acting assistant adjutant-general on the staff of Colonel R. B. Mason.
In February, 1849, he was relieved from this service and assigned in the same capacity to the staff of General Persifer F. Smith.
While thus acting his duties were changed to those of aid-de-camp on the same staff, in which capacity he continued to act until September, 1850, when he rejoined his company in St. Louis with the assurance that he would soon receive a regular staff appointment.
This promise was soon after fulfilled, and on the 27th of the same month he was appointed captain and commissary of subsistence in the regular army.
This position he held until his resignation some three years after, September 6th, 1853, having, thus completed an almost unbroken record of seven years service as an officer of the staff.
And when, after the hesitation about reentering the army at the beginning of the war, which he details at length, he finally decided to take part in the struggle, he applied for staff duty again, as is plain from the close of the letter in which he tendered his services.
‘Should they be needed,’ he writes May 8, 1861, to the Secretary of War, ‘the records of the War Department will enable you to designate the station in which I can render the most service.’
As these
Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
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