Three Years With Grant (review)

Book Reviews119 Forrest built — truly a combination of characteristics and attributes rarely found in any one man." Confirming and amplifying this judgment is a phrase from General Forrest's final address to his troops which shows his true stature and his level-headed grasp of our national status and the position of the South therein: "You have been good soldiers; you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the Government to which you have surrendered can afford to be, and will be, magnanimous." Adding to the interest and readability of this volume are the biographical sketches of the authors which are inserted by the editor at the beginning of each selection. This book is an entertaining and valuable addition to the Forrest material. James A. Scott, Jr. Iowa City, Iowa Three Years With Grant. As recalled by Sylvanus Cadwallader. Edited by Benjamin P. Thomas. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1955. Pp. xiv, 353, viii. $4.75.) sylvanus cadwallader wrote these reminiscences in 1896 in California, in a "remote little settlement," as the editor puts it, "hundreds of miles from a library, aided only by such books as he possessed, a file of the New York Herald, and letters he had written to his wife during the war." He was seventy. There is no doubt that there is much interesting material in Mr. Thomas' edited version of the lengthy original manuscript. There is certain to be doubt concerning Cadwallader's trustworthiness. On August 8, 1862, U. S. Grant sent a special order to Sherman's headquarters in Memphis requesting that the Correspondent of the Chicago Times, Warren P. Isham, be confined to the penitentiary until the close of the war for writing an article that was "false in fact and malicious in character." To obtain Isham's release the owners of the Times hired the city editor of the Milwaukee Daily News, Sylvanus Cadwallader, and sent him to Grant's headquarters in the guise of a replacement correspondent. The war correspondent business was in bad repute at the time. Correspondents were an annoyance to military command at the best, corrupt and disloyal at the worst. Cadwallader tells us that he soon realized that he had to become an exemplary correspondent before he could do anything for Isham. Within a few weeks Isham was free and sent North, and Cadwallader, by careful cultivation of both Grant and his adjutant general, J. A. Rawlins, was firmly established as a correspondent in his own right. He was with Grant, with only brief interruptions, until after Appomattox. Cadwallader obviously achieved his eventual high status at Grant's headquarters in part because of his trustworthiness and his superior abilities as a newsman. More important was the fact that within a few months after his arrival circumstance cast him in the classic role of a resourceful man taking care of a drunk. This was before Vicksburg in June of 1863, and the drunk, of course, was Grant. Cadwallader's detailed account of a roaring thirty-six hour bender is by far the most interesting section of the book. One also suspects that the account is accurate, despite the fuzziness of the reporter's recollections 120CIVIL war history elsewhere; there is a good deal of external evidence to corroborate it, and Cadwallader 's subsequent relationship with Grant corroborates it best of all: I was always recognized and spoken to, as if I had been regularly gazetted as a member of his staff. My comfort and convenience was considered; a tent pitched and struck for me whenever and wherever I chose to occupy it; . . . on several occasions he introduced me to others as a member of his personal staff: later on I often performed staff duty in carrying orders and dispatches; and was also later on furnished with orders to all guards and all picket guards, in all the armies of the United States, to pass me at any hour of the day or night, with horses and vehicles; to all Quarter-masters of transportation to furnish me transportation on demand for myself, horses and servants. . . I could take possession of any vessel, from a tug to the largest government transport, allow no one but...