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Campaigning with Grant

Horace Porter,

Brooks D. Simpson (Introduction)

4.29 · Rating details · 243 ratings · 30 reviews

In 1863 Horace Porter, then a captain, met Ulysses S. Grant as Grant commenced the campaign that would break the Confederate siege at Chattanooga. After a brief stint in Washington, Porter rejoined Grant, who was now in command of all Union forces, and served with him as a staff aide until the end of the war. Porter was at Appomattox as a brevet brigadier general, and this ...more

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Paperback, 618 pages

Published June 1st 2000 by Bison Books (first published 1897)

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May 17, 2013 Eric rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, war, us-civil-war, sam-grant

A staff officer’s readable and occasionally absorbing memoir of Grant’s patient, painstaking, year-long destruction of Lee's army. Porter says “Grant’s combativeness displayed itself only to the enemy” – a remark reflected in the book’s structure, in which anecdotes of Grant’s uxoriousness, easy relations with difficult subordinates, and courtesy to hostile Southern women alternate with accounts of his predaceous cunning in the field – the feints, the bluffs, the savage pounces! Porter is the so A staff officer’s readable and occasionally absorbing memoir of Grant’s patient, painstaking, year-long destruction of Lee's army. Porter says “Grant’s combativeness displayed itself only to the enemy” – a remark reflected in the book’s structure, in which anecdotes of Grant’s uxoriousness, easy relations with difficult subordinates, and courtesy to hostile Southern women alternate with accounts of his predaceous cunning in the field – the feints, the bluffs, the savage pounces! Porter is the source of many of the stories I’d read about Grant.

Edmund Wilson overstated things when he recommended Porter’s memoir as an essential supplement to Grant’s Personal Memoirs, the style of which Wilson found too sagely and imperturbable to admit much piteous blood-and-guts detail. Grant was incapable of the lurid Gericault manner in which Porter painted the aftermath of the battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse –

Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from their horrid entombment.

– but Porter isn’t always lurid nor Grant evasive. For instance, Grant acknowledges his disastrous mistake of ordering a suicidal second assault at Cold Harbor, a disaster Porter glosses over – though he helpfully clarifies that the strange name of the Virginia village, for me the spookiest Civil War battle/place-name after “Wilderness Tavern” and “Antietam” (which is Algonquian but sounds like a precinct of Milton’s Hell, a rebarbative Hebrew-Latin portmanteau coined by an learned Puritan divine), “had been taken from places frequently found along the highways of England, and means ‘shelter without fire.’”

At times comparison with Porter only shows how modern, how suggestive Grant’s style could be - the style that captivated Stein, Anderson, and through them influenced Hemingway. Quite often Porter takes two tedious pages to tell a story Grant compresses in an uncanny paragraph; Porter calls Grant’s dispatches “epigrammatic without his being aware of it." But the dated grandiloquence of Porter’s style, and his touching faith in White Anglo-Saxon cultural continuity (Buchanan Read’s poem on Sheridan’s ride to Winchester has made the exploit “famous for all time,” to quicken the hearts of schoolboys hence, etc.), have their own interest, at least for me, and are less conspicuous for the book’s period-ish printing. Campaigning with Grant was a volume of Century Magazine’s 1890s series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Stephen Crane read many of them on a couch in a painter friend's studio above Broadway and resolved to supply the genteel lacunae with a story of his own) re-issued by Time-Life in the 1980s with gilt edges, red-ribbon markers, decorative endpapers, and original type and illustrations. The book is uncomfortably hefty. Carrying it down the street wearing shorts I felt like a youth group minister with his Bible. Grant's foremost lieutenants, Sherman and Sheridan, appear not in wartime photographs, with lean and hungry looks, but in reproductions of the official postwar portraits made when they were successively General-in-Chief, and both are bald, their chests hung with medals, their portly stomachs crossed by sashes. After destroying the Plains Indians, both retired to New York, became theater-going gourmands and banquet speakers, wreathed in cigar smoke and young actresses. In his quickie cash-in 1892 biography of Sherman, dead the year before, the ink-stained hack James Penny Boyd says that as a “raconteur and man-about-town” the general ranked with the likes of “Chauncey M. Depew and General Horace Porter.” That made me laugh. Appropriately, Campaigning with Grant opens a vista onto the Gilded Age Power Elite (Wikipedia tells me Porter was a vice-president at Pullman).

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Aug 23, 2007 Mark rated it liked it

Shelves: history, memoir

I really enjoyed this memoir of the Civil War. Horace Porter was an aide to Ulysses Grant, and his account, while almost worshipful of Grant, was highly literate and full of good stories and pacing. Porter went on to become American ambassador to France and played the key role in finding the body of Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones, who had been buried in a pauper's grave in Paris, and getting it exhumed and transported back to the U.S. ...more

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Oct 22, 2021 Erik rated it it was amazing

Horace Porter's memoir of his time serving as one of Grant's aides during the Civil War is the source of much of what is widely known about Grant during the period of the second half of the war when Porter was attached to Grant's staff. For example, Porter is one of the main sources to describe Grant's appearance at Appomattox, in contrast to the carefully dressed Robert E. Lee:

The contrast between the two commanders was singularly striking, and could not fail to attracted marked attention as th Horace Porter's memoir of his time serving as one of Grant's aides during the Civil War is the source of much of what is widely known about Grant during the period of the second half of the war when Porter was attached to Grant's staff. For example, Porter is one of the main sources to describe Grant's appearance at Appomattox, in contrast to the carefully dressed Robert E. Lee:

The contrast between the two commanders was singularly striking, and could not fail to attracted marked attention as they sat, six or eight feet apart, facing each other. General Grant, then nearly forty-three years of age, was five feet eight inches in height, with shoulders slightly stooped. His hair and full beard were nut-brown, without a trace of gray in them. He had on his single-breasted blouse of dark-blue flannel, unbuttoned in front and showing a waistcoat underneath. He wore an ordinary pair of top-boots, with his trousers inside, and was without spurs. The boots and portions of his clothes were spattered with mud....He had no sword or sash, and a pair of shoulder straps was all there was about him to designate his rank. In fact, aside from these, his uniform was that of a private soldier."

Porter then goes on to describe Lee, 6'1", erect for his age (16 years Grant's senior), gray-haired, wearing a new uniform with a fancy sword presented by a group of ladies in England, and new boots with "some ornamental stitching of red silk" near the top. Everything he wore was clean.

This description has been cited by many as a sign of Grant's informal, democratic style as opposed to Lee's more dignified and more aristocratic personality. Such comparisons usually come at the expense of Grant, who seems slovenly and undignified compared to Lee.

But reading the rest of Porter's section on Appomattox shows that Lee didn't dress like this all the time. A few days earlier, pressed by Union cavalry, Lee and his officers had to destroy all their baggage to lighten their load on a fast retreat. So if they could only travel with the clothes on their backs, naturally each officer chose his best outfit and left the rest behind.

For his part, Grant didn't dress so informally on purpose to meet Lee. Quite the opposite. Grant also had a luggage problem. But his was driven not by rapid retreat, but by quick advance. The Union commander had gotten ahead of the wagons carrying his luggage in haste to take the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, the leading Confederate force, while the rebel general was willing. Grant was especially concerned to prevent Lee's troops from splitting off into guerrilla bands by taking their weapons and names and swearing them to formal paroles not to keep fighting as quickly as possible.

When Grant had access to his baggage throughout the war, he often dressed differently. For example, Porter describes Grant at the beginning of the Virginia Overland campaign of 1864, mounted on his bay horse Cincinnati. This time he's not wearing a short private's jacket with no other signs of rank than shoulder boards. Instead, Grant is in a general's uniform coat (long, frock coat) "and was equipped with a regulation sword, spurs, and sash."

It would be a mistake to view Grant as some kind of Oscar Madison too lazy to care about his appearance or some kind of iconoclast who insisted on bucking convention in order to display his contempt for military ceremony and show. Grant was not a clothes horse like his old commander in the Mexican-American War, Winfield Scott (known as "old fuss and feathers" for his love of pomp) and Grant was not as carefully put together as McClellan or even George Meade. But by the standards of other Union commanders, Grant may not have been as casual as we've been taught.

This and other insights will help the reader to counter myths about Grant with descriptions from Porter's first hand observation. Porter is also the source of many anecdotes about and quotes from Grant, such as the famous quote about Grant's tin-ear for music. After the hellish Battle of the Wilderness, a regimental band serenades Union commanders with a popular Black spiritual called "Ain't I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness." Grant doesn't recognize the tune, and has to have it explained to him. "The general smiled at the ready wit of the musicians, and said, 'Well, with me a musical joke always requires explanation. I know only two tunes: one is "Yankee Doodle" and the other isn't.'" ...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Mark Saha rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

First of all, Porter is the real deal. He was a young Union ordinance officer at Chattanooga when Grant arrived there to break the Confederate siege. Grant took a liking to him and pulled strings in Washington to have him assigned to his staff. The book thus primarily follows Grant's Virginia campaign to win the war, which began at the Wilderness in May of 1864 and ended with the surrender at Appomattox in April of 1865. For a reader unfamiliar with the Civil War, this book is an instructive acc First of all, Porter is the real deal. He was a young Union ordinance officer at Chattanooga when Grant arrived there to break the Confederate siege. Grant took a liking to him and pulled strings in Washington to have him assigned to his staff. The book thus primarily follows Grant's Virginia campaign to win the war, which began at the Wilderness in May of 1864 and ended with the surrender at Appomattox in April of 1865. For a reader unfamiliar with the Civil War, this book is an instructive account of that monumental campaign, but following it requires access to maps. I suggest you simply click "Images" on your Google page and search, e.g., "Wilderness campaign maps" and etc.

As someone who has read a little of both Grant and the Civil War, I personally did not find this aspect of the book particularly insightful. Porter did not write this until the turn of the century, and I suspect he refreshed his own memory by consulting everything that had been published to date. For example, at one point he says that he asked Grant, "General, what was the most important battle in which you feel your role was essential?" Grant then pontificates on Shiloh, but everything he says is familiar from other sources. I personally doubt Porter ever asked Grant such clumsy leading questions back in 1864.

Though Porter's friendship with Grant endured after the war, and he was even given a position in Grant's White House, he offers little insight into the man's character. There is not a word about his drinking, with which Grant struggled all his life. For this and other dimensions of Grant's character the reader must look elsewhere. Porter is admiring and finds no fault in the man.

Nonetheless, the book did give me an appreciation of how carefully Grant coordinated his own Virginia campaign with Sherman's drive on Atlanta and march across Georgia to the sea; with Butler's Yorktown peninsula army; with the Army of the Shenandoah; and even with the Red River Campaign in Louisiana. Grant's purpose was to assure all these Armies engaged the enemy aggressively, to prevent the Confederacy from sending reinforcements from a quiet sector to a hot one. For example, if Sherman had not pushed Johnston's army hard outside Atlanta, the latter could have detached forces to assist Lee against Grant. The Confederacy was pressed everywhere and was cracked like an eggshell.

Porter does have some funny anecdotes to pass along:

At one point in Grant's '64 campaign he establishes his headquarters at a small farm. The farmhouse is occupied only by a woman and her twenty-something year old daughter. Grant assures the woman nobody will enter the farmhouse and their privacy will be respected. The woman is not placated. She boasts that when she lived on a hillside overlooking Richmond, each morning she looked down with satisfaction at 3, 000 Union soldiers in the POW camp at Belle Isle. "Bobbie Lee is going to put the whole Union Army in POW camps," she predicted. At that moment General Burnside approached to speak to Grant, and nodded to the two women. "Afternoon, ladies." he said. "I'll bet you've never seen so many Union soldiers before." "Not at liberty, sir!" the woman shot back. Grant had a good laugh because Burnside did not understand the exchange.

Porter also writes with amusement of Grant's HQ being bombarded with military suggestions from various crackpots in the north:

During the siege of Richmond, one such nut proposed building a masonry wall around the city that was higher than the tallest buildings. The city would then be flooded with water from the James river to "drown them like rats." This nut was apparently an engineer, and enclosed plans for the necessary water pumps and their placement. Another suggestion from a chemist who had discovered a sneezing powder proposed packing it in artillery shells and bombarding Richmond. He believed the Union Army could simply march in and occupy the city while the defenders were in the grip of sneezing fits.

Overall, this book is an interesting portrait of another time, but only if you are interested enough to google the appropriate maps. Otherwise, you won't have a clue to what is happening, and much interesting information will be lost to you. ...more

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Feb 12, 2020 Jim Gallen rated it really liked it

I decided to reread “Campaigning With Grant” for an upcoming class on Ulysses S. Grant. I found a memoir by a member of Grant’s staff, Gen. Horace Porter, written during the 1890’s. It should be taken as a collection of personal recollections, refined by thirty years. The author first met Grant on October 23, 1863 at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Readers are provided with a physical description of the subject, taken along on his campaigns and treated to many of the anecdotes that have become part of t ...more

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Apr 06, 2022 John Sturgess rated it really liked it

Horace Porter joined Grants staff in April 1864 as Grant was put in command of all US forces and moved his headquarters to join the Army of the Potomac. It follows Porter from the beginning of the Overland campaign though the end of the war.
This in not just a who was were retelling of the battles of this period, but an intimate descripting of the workings of a headquarters staff, and how Grant used his staff to communicate and control the Army’s under his command.
One quote that I found enligh ...more

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Jun 26, 2021 Mark Mears rated it it was amazing

Campaigning with Grant is Gen. Horace Porter’s account of his time on Gen. Grant’s staff from April 1864 to the end of the Civil War.

Perhaps not for everyone, but for anyone who likes history and admires Grant, this book is a gold mine.

Porter’s account was published in the 1890’s, after Gen. Grant’s death. It is written by an obvious admirer. You will have to look elsewhere for accounts of alleged drunken behavior.

You will find many details of Grant’s tactical acumen and decisions, his charac ...more

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Nov 03, 2019 Sandra Oldfield rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: civil-war

I loved this book. It is appropriate that I read it after reading Grants autobiography and the other book from Dana who was with him on campaigns. I have also read a couple of biographies on him so that by the time I came to this book I was not expecting to learn much. Porter who was with Grant for the last 1 1/2-2 years of the war really sheds a light on Grant's personality in a way that no other books have for me. Small stories about what was going on behind the scenes during some battles or i ...more

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Jan 01, 2020 Erick Verleye rated it really liked it

Horace Porter is clear and to the point, not giving many personal reflections or imagery about the campaign. Porter includes personal tidbits that only a staff officer of Grant's could share, although if you have read Grant then you will already know of most of these. All in all an indispensable account of the finest hour of one of America's great leaders. ...more

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Feb 26, 2020 Mary rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I enjoyed this a lot!
It was surprising readable, and had quite a bit of humor.
The book focused mostly on Grant, but also gave a pretty good overview of the Civil War and the Union Campaigns. It also had descriptions of other famous generals, Lincoln, etc., and managed to include some pretty specific details of battles etc. without becoming dry or uninteresting.

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Oct 25, 2019 Teresa Barrett rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Great details woven into a fascinating story

Adjutant Mr. Horace Porter gets to the descriptions and stories that continue to enthrall my heart and mind. I re-read it for comfort.

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Sep 06, 2019 Zach rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

What was Grant really like? dunno, but this has to be pretty close.

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Mar 27, 2020 THOMAS WHALEN rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A History Buff's Delight!

This book is a terrific, first-hand account of General Grant's outstanding handling off the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. I highly recommend it. ...more

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Jun 25, 2020 John rated it liked it · review of another edition

Different language

The book was difficult bye read at first. The language used is from a different time. Well worth the read tough

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Feb 24, 2012 Read1000books rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: civil-war-memoirs, civil-war-history

Horace Porter, the author, was one of the members of Civil War Union General Ulysses S. Grant's staff, so this is, for the most part, an eyewitness account. The memoir begins in October of 1863 when Porter joins the staff, goes through the major campaigns which Grant oversaw, and concludes with the celebratory parades in Washington D.C. just after the surrender of the Confederate armies. We meet famous commanders such as Meade, Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer as well as details of battles such as ...more

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May 25, 2012 Kathleen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

The author, Horace Porter, was on General Grant's staff during the last year plus of the Civil War. His memoirs, "Campaigning With Grant," was written after the war from his notes taken during the war. Mr. Porter in many instances relates the original dispatches written by General Grant and others. As I was reading the book, I often noticed stories I had seen in other books. I believe these later writers used Mr. Porter's memoirs as an original source. The anecdotes he relates of General Grant, ...more

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Nov 07, 2016 Eric rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The writer of this book, Gen'l Horace Porter, was an aide to Gen'l Grant during the pivotal last campaign of the US Civil War, ending with the surrender of CSA Gen'l Lee at Appomattox Court House in 1865. And he went to work with Grant with the full intent of writing a memoir not unlike Boswell's masterpiece "The life of Samuel Johnson". So he made copious notes, and didn't publish 'til after Grant's death. Unfortunately, the popular style when he published was somewhat hagiographic, so it's all ...more

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Nov 20, 2019 Lee Harrington rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A very long and thorough primary source on the military campaigns of U. S. Grant, written by a prominent member of Grant’s staff, Horace Porter. Porter must have took copious notes on his experiences with the general and saved all of the documents and correspondence. There are countless stories told in minute detail and more than a few bits of humor and irony.
I would caution the reader, however, that Porter is solidly in Grant’s camp on every issue. There is a heavy bias in the writing which is ...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Chuck rated it liked it

Horace Porter was an aide to Grant during the Civil War, and this is his memoir of that time, originally published in the 1890's. It's pretty much a hagiography. To read it, one would think that Grant had no flaws in his person at all. For example, there is no mention of Grant's drinking. This book seems to be the source of many of the anecdotes that I've read in other authors, like Shelby Foote. If one is particularly interested in the Civil War, I would recommend this book. If not, one might f ...more

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Aug 16, 2013 Monte Lamb rated it it was amazing

Shelves: us-civil-war

This is an excellent book. Horace Porter was first in his class at West Point and was on Grant's staff during the last year and half of the Civil War. He took very good notes and wrote a very clear and informative book on what happened during the time he was on Grant's staff. He had access to most decisions to see how they were made and the book has many personal anecdotes about Grant as well as President Lincoln.

This is one of the very best personal histories written about the Civil War and is ...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Daniel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It is always fascinating to read a book written in 1897 if for nothing else than the way they wrote back then. Grant's story is one of the most compelling in American history. In essence, imagine one of the most mediocre people you knew who had not been particularly driven or successful at anything, suddenly emerging as a national hero, almost overnight. Porter does cover the period of the Virginia campaigns and also gives alot of personal insights into life in camp in those days. ...more

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Oct 16, 2014 LuAnn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This is a wonderfully descriptive book with many anecdotes of camp life, including one about President Lincoln and some kittens. While not as detailed a The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, I found it more readable and even copied some of the descriptions for use in writing classes. No book on war is fun, but this gave a realistic portrait of General Grant and the battles without being gruesome.

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Sep 21, 2008 Chuck rated it really liked it

Horace Porter was an aide to General Grant during the latter part of the war and provides an excellent insight into his commander's mind. It also explains how Grant got to be such a cigar smoker and how the decision was made to have Sherman march to the Sea. ...more

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Mar 01, 2012 Douglas Karlson rated it it was amazing

I went through a period where I only read first person memoirs of the Civil War. Horace Porter, who was an aide to General Grant through the Wilderness Campaign and on to the end of the war, is one of the best, though I still haven't read Grant's memoirs. ...more

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Oct 14, 2012 WRH rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Horace Porter was Grant's aide during the war so he onviously is not an unbiased author. However, taking that into consideration, he does provide an illuminating and well written account of what life was like with Grant ...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Gary Baughn rated it liked it

Only for the Civil War nut. Porter served on Grant's staff for the last 1.5 years of Civil War, and anything else you read about Grant quotes this book. It is the original source. Takes his time but does tell some good stories. ...more

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Oct 15, 2009 Hanny marked it as to-read

(In Patriotic Gore, Wilson cites this as one of the first non-romantic accounts of a war, and a major source for Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man") ...more

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Jul 29, 2014 Roger King rated it it was amazing

After USG's memoirs, this is the next must read on the man whom without there would be no Union. ...more

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Oct 10, 2016 David marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: to-read-history-am

A digital reproduction of this book is available for free and legal download or online reading at archive.org here. ...more

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Mar 22, 2009 Armen Chakmakjian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

This was fun although very long.

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About Horace Porter

Horace Porter

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Horace Porter served in the American Civil War and was Ulysses S. Grant's personal secretary during his presidency.

He was Ambassador of the United States to France 1897-1905. ...more