Along with the graver embarrassments which General Grant found in organizing his armies for a new campaign were smaller ones, which though sometimes concerned with trivial matters were not on that account likely to be less annoying. When the general visited us at Knoxville and Strawberry Plains in the severe weather of early January, he came practically unattended. He had with him Lieutenant-Colonel C. B. Comstock of the engineers, who continued in confidential staff relations to him to the end of the war, well known then and ever since as an officer of rare ability and discretion. At Knoxville Grant received a dispatch in cipher which he could not read because the telegraph operator at his headquarters at Nashville alone had the key. This gave him great annoyance and might have had very serious consequences. When therefore he reached Nashville on his return ride over the mountains, he directed the operator to reveal the key to Colonel Comstock, who was always with him. The operator of course reported the fact to the superintendent of military telegraphs at Washington (Colonel Anson Stager), and on the report of the latter to the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton ordered the operator summarily dismissed from his employment, and formally reprimanded Colonel Comstock as if the revelation had been merely on his personal order. Of course Grant, who had never dreamed that he was treading upon anybody's toes, immediately assumed the full responsibility. He showed the folly of making details of method override the public necessity to which they were subservient, and asked that the operator should be restored to his employment and not made to suffer for obeying his personal order. He said: "I could see no reason why I was not as capable of selecting a proper person to intrust with this secret as Colonel Stager." One would think this ought to have ended the matter, but it did not, though the operator was restored to duty. Mr. Stanton had the old cipher thrown away, issued a new one, and stuck to the plan of trusting it to an ordinary civilian operator, whilst it was not allowed to be known to the commanding general or the most responsible staff officer. Grant made the sensible suggestion that the key be given to military officers only, and be kept from the civilian operators; but Mr. Stanton adhered to the farcical notion of carrying on a cipher correspondence which should be open to the irresponsible transmitter, but secret as to the responsible commanding general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of espionage upon the general by thus inseparably tying to him a civilian over whom he had no control, like an agent of a secret police reporting to a Fouche or a Savary, it would be an intelligible though bungling contrivance; but as a means of secret communication with a general it was ridiculous in the extreme. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 150, 159, 161, 172, 323, 324, 361.]