Born Again in Mississippi - NYTimes.com Adjutant Gen. Lorenzo Thomas had assumed that General Ulysses S. Grant had lost his way. For two days, his small party of officers and orderlies had ridden around and across the same pair of bayous, making use of bridges and fords and sometimes swimming their horses. Caught in a terrific storm, they had spent a night on the ground - notwithstanding the distinguished guests in the company, General Thomas himself, on special assignment from Washington, and Congressman Elihu Washburne, Grant's friend and patron from his home state of Illinois. Washburne later recalled with admiration how the commander traveled six days in May of "63 with nothing more than a toothbrush, an example to his troops of military grit and mobility [1] . Thomas, for one, had not been inspired to follow Grant's example. He was too old for this - six months short of 60. And while he could claim, like Grant, to know the Deep South spring season in all its sweaty, gnat-smacked difficulty as a veteran of the Mexican War, General Thomas was a newcomer to this great mess in Mississippi. His instructions: urgent, extensive and plenipotentiary. Thomas would oversee the seizure of the enslaved population of the river valleys and their incorporation into the United States Army and new free labor arrangements [2] . He would instruct soldiers that emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers was now the army line: those that participated in the program would be promoted and those who resisted would be disciplined. He had been relishing the task, finding satisfaction in the formalities of dress parade and speech making - his executive role underscored by an impressive show of gold braid and sword - and born again in his Christian faith by the experience of Emancipation. As he told a minister in Corinth, where Thomas had encountered thousands of refugees and made arrangements to help them, he was "now prepared to die." Thomas enjoyed taunting army conservatives, asking those who opposed the enlistment of African Americans to step out of their ranks on the parade ground, then having them hauled off to the stockade. He was vigilant in seeking fair terms and upright managers for the network of revived plantations he had helped to organize behind Union lines [3] . Heady times for a vain man, and yet he had been crouching in the mud with the controversial general who had thus far failed to liberate the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. Both Thomas and Washburne had been acting on instructions to evaluate Grant as the head of the Western campaign, and Grant for his part had shown them why he was qualified, how he would win it [4] . Grant would ride and read and map the terrain around Vicksburg until he found a way to ram his armies through the city. He was on the move, and to see whether they thought Grant's strategy would work the adjutant general and the congressman had to keep moving, too. Exposed to such rigors, General Thomas fell disastrously ill, but not before he took part in the opening series of battles in the Vicksburg campaign: witnessing the breaking of the levees above Vicksburg and riding the flood during the Navy's descent at Grand Gulf; crossing with the troops and 12-year-old Fred Grant at Bruinsberg and observing the skirmish at Port Gibson; on to Jackson in the pouring rain; celebrating with other Union officers in a fine hotel at last; then catching the newly opened railroad up to Memphis, already wracked with fever. He did not stop working, mustering in the First Regiment of Mississippi Volunteers of African Descent on May 19, the Second Arkansas Volunteers of African Descent on May 21, and the First Regiment Tennessee Heavy Artillery of African Descent on May 27 in Memphis, then moving on to Louisville to organize the First Alabama Volunteers of African Descent and to dismiss from the service a Chicago officer who had criticized the Thomas mission in a newspaper back home. On June 13, the general issued special orders to appoint a medical officer to assist him, then sank into a state near death [5] . All around the Mississippi Valley, men and women were dying of causes much like those afflicting Thomas: too much filth and disease in barracks and contraband camps, too many mosquitos and hardships, and too little clean water amid the sweltering heat. Had he died, he would have suffered the fate of three quarters of a million soldiers like himself. And yet none but Thomas represented the administration of Abraham Lincoln and the War Department. No other bore a personal responsibility for resolving the problem at the heart of the war. The news from Louisville that Thomas had survived his ordeal prompted jubilation in the telegraph office and he returned to Washington in late July to a hero's welcome. His life had been unalterably changed by his engagement in the war on slavery, the general explained to a reporter for The New York Times. "This mighty mass of suffering and injustice rose before me like a mountain - it oppressed me with its hugeness and difficulty - it literally made me sick," he said. His beloved Army - disoriented by the scale of its encounter with the freedmen - had become a part of the problem. "But all this had now got to cease," he insisted, "these facts having come to the knowledge of the authorities at Washington, they had sent me there to put an end to them - an absolute end." Like Lincoln, Thomas perceived the hand of God in the experience. "I was raised by a slave, I once owned slaves," he had explained to soldiers. I know all the prejudices upon this subject but I have overcome them. The president for one was eager to return the old man to the field of service. "I desire that a renewed and vigorous effort be made to raise colored forces along the shores of the Mississippi," he instructed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on the day after Thomas's profile in The Times appeared. I think the evidence is nearly conclusive that General Thomas is one of the best (if not the very best) instruments for this service. Reassured by the assignment of a comfortable steamboat for his private use, the adjutant general made haste to return to the scene of his transformation. On Aug. 1, the president saluted Thomas at a dinner hosted by the editor John Forney and attended by the Washington elite. "General!," said Lincoln, "You are going about a most important work. There is a draft down there which can be enforced. Lorenzo Thomas promised to enforce it, and made a few comments on the greatness of the opportunity. "I regard his attitude as most significant," observed the president's secretary, John Hay, in his White House journal. Thomas after all was a slave-state man and professional bureaucrat, whose self-interest had always dictated a lack of personal engagement in political affairs. "He is a straw which shows whither the wind is blowing," Hay wrote. The tendency of the country is toward universal freedom when men like Thomas make abolition speeches at public dinners. [1] "Conversation with Gen. Thomas," New York Times, July 20, 1863; Isaac Newton Arnold, The History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery (Chicago: Clarke & Co., 1867), 403. [2] Michael A. Eggleston, "President Lincoln's Recruiter: General Lorenzo Thomas and the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War" (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2013), 32-3; Edwin Stanton to Lorenzo Thomas, March 25, 1863, RG 94, Entry 363, Records of the Adjutant General, National Archives, Washington, D.C. [3] "Disgraceful - Damnable: Adjutant General Thomas Punishes Irish Soldiers for Refusing to Hurrah for the Abolition Policy," Wisconsin Daily Patriot, July 27, 1863. [4] Julian K. Larke, "General Grant and His Campaigns" (New York: J. C. Derby and N. C. Miller, 1864), 312. [5] Office the Adjutant General, Generals" Papers and Books, Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, General's Papers and Books ... April to December, 1863 Box 1, RG 94, National Archives and Records Administration; "Conversations with Gen. Thomas," New York Times, July 20, 1863. [6] Quoted in John Eaton to Reverend S. S. Jocelyn, May 18, 1863, Roll 1, Target 1: Office of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, Letters Sent by John Eaton, General Superintendent of Contrabands, Volume (74), Feb. - Dec. 1863, Records of the Mississippi Freedmen's Department ("Pre-Bureau Records"), Office of the Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned lands, 1863-1865, M1914, NARA. [7] Lincoln to Stanton, July 21, 1863 in "Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings, Volume I" (New York: Century, 1920), 372. [8] Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettinger, "Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay" (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1999), 69. LeeAnna Keith teaches history at Collegiate School. She is the author of "The Colfax Massacre." Her forthcoming book is about the Radical Republicans of the Civil War Era.