Perhaps no family in the whole United States was better adapted to supply first-class men by this process than the Shermans'. For generations they have been of strong, practical, thoughtful minds, employed in the highest occupations, laborious and efficient in action, pure and lofty in moral tone and character. Roger Minot Sherman, the Revolutionary statesman, was of this stock, though not in the same direct line with the General. General Sherman's grandfather, Hon. Taylor Sherman, was long a judge in Connecticut, and his father, Hon. Charles R. Sherman, was also a judge, having occupied the bench of the Superior Court of Ohio during the last six years of his life. He died in 1829, leaving his widow in narrow circumstances, with eleven children. Of these, Charles T. Sherman, the eldest, has since been a successful lawyer at Washington; William Tecumseh, the General, was the sixth, and John, the energetic, loyal and useful Senator from Ohio, the seventh. The name of Tecumseh was given in consequence of Judge Sherman's admiration of the noble qualities of that famous chief. Thomas Ewing, the eminent Whig politician, speaker and statesman, had been an intimate personal friend of Judge Sherman, and when the boy, in those days commonly called by the unlovely nickname of "Cump," from his Indian name of Tecumseh, was about nine years old, Mr. Ewing kindly adopted him and assumed the entire charge of his support and education. Mr. Ewing, in speaking to one of General Sherman's biographers of his character as a boy, described him as not particularly noticeable otherwise than as a good scholar and a steady, honest, intelligent fellow. He said that he "never knew so young a boy who would do an errand so promptly and correctly as he did. He was transparently honest, faithful, and reliable. Studious and correct in his habits, his progress in education was steady and substantial." In 1836, Mr. Ewing was a member of Congress from Ohio, and having the right to nominate a cadet at West Point, he offered the appointment to his adopted son, who gladly accepted it, and went successfully through the course of study, graduating in 1840. It is a good illustration of the wholesome stringency of the discipline there, that Sherman's class was a hundred and forty strong when it entered, but only forty-two were left to graduate. The rest had fainted by the way for lack of knowledge or energy, or had been dismissed for some fault. In this "Gideon's band" of forty-two, Sherman stood sixth. A short extract from one of his letters while a cadet shows a curious specimen of the same mixture of peremptory sternness in exacting duties and substantial kindness to those who deserved it _but no others_, which have so often been noted in him since. He writes about the freshman who was according to custom under his particular charge, by the local appellation of a "pleb," as follows: