Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/36

 all talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the 66th the "Bloody Sixty-sixth," a name I have since heard applied to other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army's battles until after Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred, under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.

III

My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department, so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,—he went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he went rather in that political capacity