Diary of Orrin Brown, Savannah, Georgia
Thursday–Jan. 19th
We received orders this morning and left camp at about 8 AM and we pitched in and carried off all the lumber they had in their tents and about 4 PM they came back again but we had used up about all of the lumber to fix bunks in our tents. It began to rain about 2 PM and rained very steady all the afternoon so we did not go on drill. There was a salute of 36 guns fired in the City about 3 PM said to be for the capture by our forces of Wilmington N. C. We drew 2 days rations of Hardtack, Sugar, Coffee, and one of Salt Poark, this evening. Read 3 Chapt. in the testament today.
William Sherman returned from California in the winter of 1850 to deliver dispatches to the Office of the General of the Army in New York. Old Fuss and Feathers, Gen. Winfield Scott, fresh from the Mexican War, ordered Sherman to dinner the very day after he arrived. Scott was hunting a presidential nomination for the election of 1852, and was as interested in the young lieutenant’s connection to then-Secretary of the Interior and one-time and future U.S. Senator Thomas Ewing (Cump’s foster father/father-in-law) as he was interested in Sherman’s reports from the Gold Rush.
In Washington, D.C., Sherman won an even higher-ranked dinner invitation, from President Zachary Taylor himself, who apparently was quite taken with the Ohioan. Alas, Taylor died soon after, and succeeding President Millard Fillmore of the Know Nothing Party gave Ewing the boot. Old Fuss and Feathers did come through. Sherman was promoted to the rank of captain and posted to St. Louis on the Mississippi River.
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