to see 'Jeb Stuart' in captivity
than it has given me to see you," and with a bow and smile he vanished.

Although we remained in Washington for about two months, I did not see
him again. He never saw "Jeb Stuart" in captivity, but it was in a fight
with the Michigan cavalry brigade that the dashing raider was killed. So
the remark of the Congressman was not such an idle boast, after all.

When the Seventh Michigan arrived it was put in camp on the Seventh
street side. Colonel J.T. Copeland, of the Fifth Michigan, was promoted
to brigadier general of volunteers and assigned to the command of the
three regiments. The brigade was attached to the division of General
Silas Casey, all under General S.P. Heintzelman, who was in charge of
the Department of Washington, with headquarters in the city. Freeman
Norvell succeeded Copeland as colonel of the Fifth. The department
extended out into Virginia as far as Fairfax Court House, and there was
a cordon of troops entirely around the city.

The prospect was that the brigade would see little, if any fighting, for
a time, as it was not to be sent on to the army at Falmouth. The work of
drilling and disciplining went on without relaxation throughout the
winter months, and when arms were issued, it was found, to the delight
of all concerned, that we were to have repeating rifles.

The muskets or rifles issued to the United States infantry, during the
civil war, were inferior weapons, and a brigade of Michigan militia of
the present period would make short work of a military force of equal
numbers so armed. It is one of the strange things about that war that
the ordnance department did not anticipate the Austrians, Germans and
French, in the employment of the fire-arm loaded at the breech which was
so effective in the Franco-Prussian conflict and, if I am not mistaken,
in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, also. This made of the
individual soldier a host in himself. The old muzzle-loader, with its
ramrod and dilatory "motions," ought to have been obsolete long before
Grant left the West to lead the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness
to Appomattox. The Michigan cavalry brigade, armed as it was with
repeating carbines, was never whipped when it had a chance to use them.
In arming the infantry the government was fifty years behind the times.

Possibly the same thing might be said truthfully of the artillery also,
though the union artillerists, notwithstanding the handic