John M. Schofield, Forty-six years in the Army

[460] the headquarters of the army, in anticipation of the more complete equipment of the artillery posts with the apparatus necessary for the proper conduct of artillery instruction and target practice. The course of instruction covered the use of plane tables, telescopic and other sights, electrical firing-machines, chronographs, velocimeters, anemometers, and other meteorological instruments, stop-watches, signaling, telegraphy, vessel tracking, judging distances, and, in short, everything essential to the scientific use of the guns. By ‘General Orders, No. 62, Headquarters of the Army,’ July 2, 1889, Lieutenant T. H. Bliss, First Artillery, Aide-de-Camp to General Schofield commanding, was announced as inspector of small arms and artillery practice. As an inducement to greater application on the part of the student officers of the Artillery School and of the Infantry and Cavalry School, the distinction of ‘honor graduate’ was conferred on all officers who had graduated, or should graduate, either first or second from the Artillery School, or first, second, or third from the Infantry and Cavalry School: the same to appear with their names in the Army Register as long as such graduates should continue on the active or retired list of the army. . . .

In August, 1886, after the passage of a bill by Congress, General Fitz-John Porter was restored to the army, as colonel, by President Cleveland. When I was in the War Department in 1868, General Porter had come to me with a request that I would present his case to the President, and recommend that he be given a rehearing. I declined to do so, on the ground that, in my opinion, an impartial investigation and disposition of his case, whatever were its merits, could not be made until the passions and prejudices begotten by the war had subsided much further than they had done at that time. In the course of conversation I told him that while I never permitted myself to form an opinion of any case without much more knowledge of it than I then had of his, I presumed, from the finding of the court-martial, that he had at least been guilty of acting upon what he supposed to be his own better judgment under the circumstances he found