The
responsibility for the movement of the army was with me, and whilst
I should be inclined to confer very freely with my principal
subordinates and explain my purposes, I should call no councils of
war, and submit nothing to vote till I felt incompetent to decide
for myself. If they apologized for their conduct and showed
earnestness in military obedience to orders, what they had now said
would be overlooked, but on any recurrence of cause for complaint I
should enforce my power by the arrest of the offender at once. I
dismissed them with this, and immediately sent out the formal orders
through my adjutant-general to march early next morning. Before they
slept one of the three had come to me with earnest apology for his
part in the matter, and a short time made them all as subordinate as
I could wish. The incident could not have occurred in the brigade
which had been under my command at Camp Dennison, and was a not
unnatural result of the sudden assembling of inexperienced men under
a brigade commander of whom they knew nothing except that at the
beginning of the war he was a civilian like themselves. These very
men afterward became devoted followers, and some of them life-long
friends.
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