ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Sept. 28, 1861

While Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commands his troops from headquarters at Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, Julia Dent Grant and the four Grant children remain in the family home, a rented brick house in hilly Galena, in northwestern Illinois. Nearly 400 miles separate husband and father from wife and children. Always uncomfortable when separated from his family, Ulysses writes Julia almost daily, urging her to join him and bring the children. Afflicted with “much timidity” about moving nearer the combat zone, Julia will demur until early November.

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, Sept. 25, 1861

Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, headquartered in Cairo, Illinois, sends troops to occupy Smithland, Kentucky…thereby saving the strategically important mouth of the Cumberland River from capture by the Confederates. The 687-mile Cumberland River, which empties into the Ohio River, offered a “superhighway” into the Middle South, originating in eastern Kentucky and curving into northern Tennessee before returning to Kentucky. On September 6, Grant had staged a similarly bloodless occupation of Paducah, Kentucky, situated at the mouth of the Tennessee River, an even more important watercourse. The Tennessee stretches 652 miles from Alabama, through Tennessee and into Kentucky to the Ohio River. Using his own initiative, Grant has scored two early victories for the Union.

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Sept. 21, 1861

Several little-known Ohioans are preparing for war, unable to even guess at the prominence the war will bring them. In Cairo, Illinois, at the far edge of the war’s Western Theater, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant calmly and confidently goes about training his soldiers. Pipe smoke curls in the air as he pores over maps, looking for ways to go on the attack. Unpretentious but possessing an unmistakable command presence, Grant is called "the quiet man" by his soldiers.

In Kentucky, another new brigadier general of volunteers, nervous, red-haired William Tecumseh Sherman, has arrived to assist in defending that border state for the Union—and is beginning to feel uneasy about the challenge facing him. Elsewhere, Capt. Philip H. Sheridan, a little man who dearly loves a fight, is en route from the Pacific Northwest to St. Louis, called away from the pacification of Indians, eager to join the war at last. In Washington, Edwin M. Stanton—not yet a member of Lincoln’s government—is grumbling, as usual, about the President’s management of the war.