http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-pdf/4367-pdf.pdf

My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2889029&forum_id=2.#27961849)

Musing thus beside the dying embers of the campfire, he looked across its low glow at the lieutenant general, who seemed to be musing too. “His hat was drawn down over his face, the high collar of an old blue army overcoat turned up above his ears, one leg crossed over the other knee, eyes on the ashes in front.” Only the fitful crossing and recrossing of his legs indicated that he was not asleep, and Cadwallader supposed that the general’s thoughts were as gloomy as his own — until at last Grant spoke and disabused him of the notion. He began what the reporter termed “a pleasant chatty conversation upon indifferent subjects,” none of which had anything to do with the fighting today or yesterday. As he got up from his chair to go to bed, however, he spoke briefly of “the sharp work General Lee had been giving us for a couple of days,” then turned and went into his tent to get some sleep. That was all. But now that Cadwallader realized that the general had not been sharing them, he found that all his gloomy thoughts were gone. Grant opposed by Lee in Virginia, he perceived, was the same Grant he had known in Mississippi and Tennessee, where Pemberton and Bragg had been defeated. “It was the grandest mental sunburst of my life,” he declared years later, looking back on the effect this abrupt realization had had on his state of mind from that time forward. “I had suddenly emerged from the slough of despond, to the solid bedrock of unwavering faith.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2889029&forum_id=2.#27961969)

In general he went about his job, as one observer had stated at the outset, “with so little friction and noise that it required a second look to be sure he was doing anything at all.” One of his staff officers got the impression that he was “half a dozen men condensed into one,” while a journalist, finding him puzzling in the extreme because he seemed to amount to a good deal more than the sum of all his parts, came up with the word “unpronounceable” as the one that described him best. Grant, he wrote, “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He had no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks.… A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and a square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an unpronounceable man; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.”

The soldiers appreciated the lack of “superfluous flummery” as he moved among them, “turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.” They almost never cheered him, and they did not often salute him formally; rather, they watched him, as one said, “with a certain sort of familiar reverence.” Present discouragements were mutual; so, someday, would be the glory. Somehow he was more partner than boss; they were in this thing together. “Good morning, General,” “Pleasant day, General,” were the usual salutations, more fitting than cheers or hat-tossing exhibitions; “A pleasant salute to, and a good-natured nod from him in return, seems more appropriate.” All these things were said of him, and this: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar on theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2889029&forum_id=2.#27961977)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2889029&forum_id=2.#27961990)