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