If they apologized for their conduct and showed earnestness in military obedience to orders, what they had now said would be overlooked, but on any recurrence of cause for complaint I should enforce my power by the arrest of the offender at once.

I dismissed them with this, and immediately sent out the formal orders through my adjutant-general to march early next morning.

Before they slept one of the three had come to me with earnest apology for his part in the matter, and a short time made them all as subordinate as I could wish.

The incident could not have occurred in the brigade which had been under my command at Camp Dennison, and was a not unnatural result of the sudden assembling of inexperienced men under a brigade commander of whom they knew nothing except that at the beginning of the war he was a civilian like themselves.

These very men afterward became devoted followers, and some of them life-long friends.