Thank you. I was alluding to the story told by Douglas MacArthur, about his father and Gen. Phil Sheridan following Arthur MacArthur's assault on the ridge. It is in William Manchester's book, American Caesar, pg 15.
"A few minutes after five o'clock Sheridan arrived on the scene. As Douglas MacArthur told the story a century afterward, the general embraced the teen-aged adjutant and said to the young man's comrades in a broken voice, "Take care of him. He has just won the Medal of Honor." If true, this would bespeak an extraordinary prescience, since the award, owing to red tape, was not made until twenty-seven years later."
"When the war ended I was Lieutenant Colonel, but held the Governor's commission as Colonel, which the War Department refused to recognize."
Manchester also writes, "For 'gallant and meritorious services in the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., and in the Atlanta campaign,' [Arthur MacArthur] was brevetted again, this time to the rank of full colonel, thus becoming, at nineteen, the youngest officer of that rank in the Union Army. Henceforth he would become known throughout Wisconsin as the 'boy colonel'."
That is what Arthur MacArthur, Jr. essentially said -- he was brevetted -- he was NOT awarded the rank by the U.S. Army or War Dept.
It is similar to more modern "frocking."