At that moment General Meade was in Atlanta, Georgia, commanding the Third Military District under the “Reconstruction Act;” and General Thomas, whose post was in Nashville, was in Washington on a court of inquiry investigating certain allegations against General A. B. Dyer, Chief of Ordnance.  He occupied the room of the second floor in the building on the corner of H and Fifteenth Streets, since become Wormley’s Hotel.  I at the time was staying with my brother, Senator Sherman, at his residence, 1321 K Street, and it was my habit each morning to stop at Thomas’s room on my way to the office in the War Department to tell him the military news, and to talk over matters of common interest.  We had been intimately associated as “man and boy” for thirty-odd years, and I profess to have had better opportunities to know him than any man then living.  His fame as the “Rock of Chickamauga” was perfect, and by the world at large he was considered as the embodiment of strength, calmness, and imperturbability.  Yet of all my acquaintances Thomas worried and fretted over what he construed neglects or acts of favoritism more than any other.

At that time he was much worried by what he supposed was injustice in the promotion of General Sheridan, and still more that General Meade should have an Eastern station, which compelled him to remain at Nashville or go to the Pacific.  General Thomas claimed that all his life he had been stationed in the South or remote West, and had not had a fair share of Eastern posts, whereas that General Meade had always been there.  I tried to get him to go with me to see President Grant and talk the matter over frankly, but he would not, and I had to act as a friendly mediator.  General Grant assured me at the time that he not only admired and respected General Thomas, but actually loved him as a man, and he authorized me in making up commands for the general officers to do anything and everything to favor him, only he could not recede from his former action in respect to Generals Sheridan and Meade.

Prior to General Grant’s inauguration the army register showed as major-generals Halleck, Meade, Sheridan, Thomas, and Hancock.  Therefore, the promotion of General Sheridan to be lieutenant-general did not “overslaugh” Thomas, but it did Meade and Halleck.  The latter did not expect promotion; General Meade did, but was partially, not wholly, reconciled by being stationed at Philadelphia, the home of his family; and President Grant assured me that he knew of his own knowledge that General Sheridan had been nominated major-general before General Meade, but had waived dates out of respect for his age and longer service, and that he had nominated him as lieutenant-general by reason of his special fitness to command the Military Division of the Missouri, embracing all the wild Indians, at that very moment in a state of hostility.  I gave General Thomas the choice of every other command in the army, and of his own choice he went to San