Download or read book Recollections of Seventy Years: Civil War and Beyond written by Chetlain and published by BIG BYTE BOOKS. This book was released on with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Augustus (Gus) Chetlain lived a remarkably active life full of honors, diplomatic posts abroad, meetings with generals, presidents, and royalty, and political life. Yet when he penned this autobiography, he signed it with the title that meant the most to him: general in the Union army of the American Civil War. Chetlain was the first man in Illinois to volunteer and rose to become a Major General. He was also ordered by Ulysses S. Grant to take charge of training newly-freed African-Americans as soldiers: “I believe the colored man will make a good soldier. He has been accustomed all his life to lean on the white man, and if a good officer is placed over him, he will learn readily and make an efficient soldier.--U.S. Grant” When told in one city that they did not want his "colored" troops marching through the city, Chetlain told them, "I answered that these were United States troops, who had a right to pass through their city." He met Lincoln before he became president. He knew Ulysses S. Grant as a clerk in the Grant store in Galena, as commander of all Union forces in the war, and as president of the United States. Chetlain wrote: "...in November, 1864, reports showed that there were 179,000 colored soldiers fit for duty, and, adding the disabled and absent on furlough, the total would have been about 200,000, a large army of itself, numbering nearly one-sixth of the entire Union army. The colored soldiers, as the representatives of over 4,000,000 slaves, who served in the Union army during the war, deserve great credit for what they did to save the Union." Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones