 |
| Aikens' Mansion on James River. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[693]
My last positive commands did not reach Smith until five o'clock in the morning because he had hidden himself away, as will be seen by the statement of Lieutenant Davenport.
This ended all proper interference of mine with the attack on Petersburg, because, on the morning of the 16th, Petersburg was invested by the army of General Grant under his own command.
Notwithstanding the evidence I had before me of General Smith's wilful disobedience of orders, entire insubordination and mendacity,
I was still unwilling to report him, as I ought to have done, to be relieved by the lieutenant-general; and so I attempted to remain, as I had been, on friendly terms with him. Although, in order to get rid of my orders to make the attack on Petersburg, he had misrepresented a fact to me, I concluded to overlook it.
We went on, nothing coming up to cause any disagreement until a demonstration was ordered by General Grant to be made from Bermuda Hundred across the James to seize and hold Deep Bottom.
This was to be done by a surprise early in the morning, and I
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.