ferior grades, upon whose claims you may never be called to pass judgment. But if you care to read them here they are.
Yours, very faithfully,
C. A. Dana.
LIFE BEHIND VICKSBURG.
We had not been many days in the rear of Vicksburg before we settled into regular habits. The men were detailed in reliefs for work in the trenches, and being relieved at fixed hours, everybody seemed to lead a systematic life.
My chief duty throughout the siege was a daily round through the trenches, generally with the corps commander or some one of his staff. As the lines of investment were six or seven miles long, it occupied the greater part of my day: sometimes I made a portion of my tour of inspection in the night. One night in riding through the trenches I must have passed 20,000 men asleep on their arms. I still can see the grotesque positions into which they had curled themselves. The trenches were so protected that there was no danger in riding through them. It was not so safe to venture on the hills overlooking Vicksburg. I went on foot and alone one day to the top of a hill, and was looking at the town, when I suddenly heard something go whizz, whizz, by my ear. "What in the world is that?" I asked myself. The place was so desolate that it was an instant before I could believe that these were bullets intended for me. When I came to understand it I immediately started to lie down. Then came the question, Which is the best way to lie down? If I lay at right angles to the enemy's line the bullets from the right and left might strike me; if I lay parallel to it, then those directly from the front might hit me. So I concluded it made no difference which way I lay. After I had remained quiet for a time the bullets ceased, and I left the hill-top. I was more cautious in the future in venturing beyond cover.
Through the entire siege I lived in General Grant's headquarters, which were on a high bluff point northeast of Sherman's extreme left. I had a tent to myself, and on the whole was very comfortable. We never lacked an abundance of provisions. There was good water, enough even for the bath, and we suffered very little from excessive heat. The only serious annoyance was the cannonade from our whole line, which from the first of June went on steadily by night as well as by day. The following bit from a letter I wrote on June 2d to my little daughter tells something of my situation:
It is real summer weather here, and after coming in at noon to-day from my usual ride through the trenches, I was very glad to get a cold bath in my tent before dinner. I like living in tents very well, especially if you ride on horseback all day. Every night I sleep with one side of the tent wide open and the walls put up all around to get plenty of air. Sometimes I wake up in the night and think it is raining, the wind roars so in the tops of the great oak forest on the hillside where we are encamped; and I think it is thundering till I look out and see the golden moonlight in all its glory, and listen again and know that it is only the thunder of General Sherman's great guns, that neither rest nor let others rest by night or by day.
Living at headquarters as I did, I soon became intimate with Grant, not only knowing every one of his operations while it was still but an idea, but studying its execution on the spot. Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered; when the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social, friendly man, too, fond of a pleasant joke and also ready with one; but, above all, fond of a long chat of an evening and ready to sit up with you all night talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not demonstrative in friendship, but always holding to his friends, and just even to the enemies he hated.
After Grant, I spent more time at Vicksburg with his assistant adjutant-general, Lieutenant-Colonel Rawlins, and with Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson, than with anybody else. Rawlins was one of the most valuable men in the army, in my judgment. He had but a limited education, which he had picked up at the neighborhood school and in Galena, Illinois, near which place he was born and where he had worked himself into the law; but he had a very able mind, clear, strong, and not subject to hysterics. He bossed everything at Grant's headquarters. Rawlins possessed very little respect for persons, and his style of conversation was rough; I have heard him curse at Grant when, according to his judgment, the general was doing some-
