“When you don’t know what to say, say nothing,”—Diary of Rutherford B. Hayes

Sunday [June] 16.–Colonel Rosecrans and Matthews, having gone to Cincinnati, and Colonel King to Dayton, I am left in command of camp, some twenty-five hundred to three thousand men–an odd position for a novice, so ignorant of all military things. All matters of discretion, of common judgment, I get along with easily, but I was for an instant puzzled when a captain in the Twenty-fourth, of West Point education, asked me formally, as I sat in tent, for his orders for the day, he being officer of the day. Acting on my motto, “When you don’t know what to say, say nothing,” I merely remarked that I thought of nothing requiring special attention; that if anything was wanted out of the usual routine I would let him know.