up service in the field, for which he was well fitted and which he
earnestly desired, to act as Military Governor of the Sea Islands,
where his work was to receive and care for the thousands of negroes
who by the flight of their masters in that region had been left
to themselves. Here he remained throughout the war, while his old
comrades were winning fame at the head of divisions and corps, a
patient, humane teacher and administrator among the nation's wards.
He was content to live through the stirring time inconspicuous, but he
won the respect of all kindly hearts at the North and deep gratitude
from the helpless blacks whom he so long and humanely befriended.

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 me