Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[357] was then as unknown in America as in Europe. Laborious, persevering, and reticent, he had displayed great personal bravery during the Mexican war. After attaining the rank of captain of infantry, he had left the army, and when the war broke out was engaged in the leather trade. Without personal ambition, but convinced that it was the imperative duty of those who had received a military education at the expense of the State to rally around the national flag, he entered a regiment from Illinois, his native State, and soon became a colonel. He was to have the good fortune of not attaining the highest positions too soon, but he exercised from the beginning of the war commands almost independent. He was thus able to profit by the experience of those who were at first his superiors; and when he attained the highest rank, he had already acquired a profound knowledge of the war which he was to be called upon to conduct.

Almost in front of him, at Columbus, were the headquarters of the ranking commander of all the Confederate forces in the West. The person who exercised these high functions would have been more at home at the head of some feudal bands of the Middle Ages, than as commander of an American army in the nineteenth century. This was the Right Reverend Doctor Leonidas Polk, Protestant Episcopal bishop of Louisiana. Educated at West Point, Polk had left the army after serving two years, and had entered the Church. But when the South took up arms, he remembered his military education; and after having refused the rank of brigadier-general, he could not resist the offer of a majorgeneral's epaulettes. Nevertheless, in donning the uniform, the warlike prelate took care to declare that he did not renounce either his holy calling or his episcopal functions, and he informed his flock that he should return to his diocese as soon as he had performed what he called his duties as a citizen. But he was destined to die as a soldier, and not as a bishop. He was killed by a cannon-ball on one of the battle-fields of Georgia in 1864, at the very moment when fortune was declaring in favor of his enemies.

At the time of which we are speaking, Grant had been invested with a command altogether distinct from that of the Missouri— one which placed the rivers that unite near Cairo under his special