I came in contact during that visit with a number of soldiers soon to be famous.  In the boat which carried me from the transport to the shore I had as a fellow-passenger James H. Wilson, then a lieutenant but soon to be a famous cavalry commander.  He was a restless athletic young man, who when I met him was on fire with wrath over the giving up of Mason and Slidell, the news of which had come to the post by our steamer.  I tried to argue with him, that we had enough on our hands with the South without rushing into war with England besides, but he was impetuously confident that we could take care of all foes outside and in, and maintained that the giving up of the envoys was a burning shame.  His vigour and confidence were excessive, I thought, but they carried him far in a time soon to come.

I talked with General Thomas W. Sherman, the commander of the expedition, in his tent, but was more interested in a dispute which presently sprang up between the General and a companion of mine, Jonathan Saxton, father of Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist of the most perfervid type, a good talker and quite unabashed, plain farmer though he was, by a pair of epaulettes.

Among our regular officers there were few abolitionists.  Rufus Saxton told me that Lyon was the only one of any distinction who could be so classed among the men he knew.  T.W.  Sherman was like his fellows and listened impatiently to what he felt was fanaticism gone mad, but the fluent old farmer drove home his radicalism undauntedly.  T.W.  Sherman before the war had been a well-known figure as commander of Sherman’s flying artillery, which was perhaps the most famous organisation of the regular army, but his name scarcely appears in the history of the Civil War, more perhaps from lack of good fortune than of merit.  He was crippled with wounds in the first important battle in which he was concerned.  The two brigadiers at Port Royal, Horatio G. Wright and Isaac I. Stevens, both became soldiers of note.  Wright was a handsome fellow in his best years, whom I recall stroking his chin with an amused quizzical expression while Jonathan Saxton poured out his Garrisonism.  His brigade lay well to the south and his headquarters were at the old Tybee lighthouse which marked the entrance to the harbour of Savannah.  I climbed with him up the sand hill, from the top of which we looked down upon Fort Pulaski then in Confederate hands and within short range.  We peered cautiously over the summit, for shells frequently came from the fort.  Wright held in his hand a fragment of one which had just before exploded.  “How well it took the groove!” he said, pointing out to me the signs on the iron that the rifled cannon from which it had come had given the missile in the discharge the proper twist.  Wright’s after-career is part of the war’s history, always strenuous and constantly rising.  The fame which attaches to the Sixth Corps is largely due to the leadership of Wright.  If he fell short at Cedar Creek in 1864 it was a lapse which may be pardoned in the circumstances.  Sheridan retrieved the day and magnanimously palliated the misfortune of Wright.  “It might have happened to me or to any man.”  The good soldier deserves the fine monument which stands by his grave in the foreground at Arlington.