Excerpt from General Sherman in the Last Year of the Civil War: An Address Delivered at the Thirty-Eighth Reunion of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee at St. Louis, Missouri Without pretensions to oratory and without the ability to describe from knowledge experiences or campaigns in that great war, whose memories it is the object of these reunions to perpetuate, I am at a disadvantage compared with those who have delivered the addresses upon previous occasions. Thus handicapped, I have contented myself with preparing a condensed narrative of the acts and operations of my father, General Wm. Tecumseh Sherman, during the last year of the war, in which I have attempted to explain his opinions and motives in the light of tradition and of information derived from private or unpublished papers. I can present little that is new, perhaps nothing new of historical importance, yet I hope that what I have to present may prove not altogether uninteresting. When in February, 1864, General Grant was appointed to the command of all the Union armies and went East to direct personally the operations of the Army of the Potomac in Virginia, he left my father, General Sherman, to succeed him in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, which comprised, roughly, all the territory between the Alleghany Mountains, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Gulf. The number of soldiers borne on its rolls mounted high into the hundreds of thousands; but many of them were sick or at home on furlough, or were recruits or trainmen or teamsters. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.