Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 1

[375] urination. It was a knowledge of his own traits and his own acts that made him so secure. He was one day riding around his lines, and stopped for water at the house of a rebel woman, who had remained within her shattered walls, not changing her disloyal sentiments. She asked Grant, tauntingly, if he expected ever to get into Vicksburg. ‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘But when?’ ‘I cannot tell exactly when I shall take the town, but I mean to stay here till I do, if it takes me thirty years.’ The woman's heart seemed to fail her at the reply. Apparently, she had hoped that her friends might be able to tire out the besiegers, even if they could not drive them off; but this waiting thirty years, if necessary, was a greater persistency than she had contemplated.

His orders to subordinates completely express this side of Grant's character, and reveal the means by which he accomplished his results. To Dennis, on the west bank of the Mississippi, he said, on the 13th of June: ‘Drive the enemy from Richmond. Reenforce Mower all you can, and send him to do it.’ This is the entire dispatch. To McClernand, June 15th: ‘Should the enemy attempt to get past your left, with the view of forming a junction with Johnston's force, he must be defeated . . . . . We should hold and fight the enemy wherever he presents himself, from the extreme right to your extreme left. . . .’ In the same dispatch, but on another subject, he said: ‘This is given only as a general plan, to be adopted under certain circumstances. The movements of an enemy necessarily determine counter-movements’—a principle that Grant never forgot, either in his instructions to others, or in his own plans of battle or campaign.