prospect of appearing as something more than a backwoods attorney smiled for a single moment on him. He was briefed to appear in an important case outside Illinois with an eminent lawyer from the East, Edwin M. Stanton; but he was not allowed to open his mouth, for Stanton snuffed him out with supreme contempt, and he returned home crestfallen. Stanton before the war was a strong Democrat, but hated slavery. In the last days of Buchanan's Presidency he was made Attorney-General and helped much to restore the lost credit of that Administration. He was now in Washington, criticising the slow conduct of the war with that explosive fury and scorn which led him to commit frequent injustice (at the very end of the war he publicly and monstrously accused Sherman of being bribed into terms of peace by Southern gold), which concealed from most eyes his real kindness and a lurking tenderness of heart, but which made him a vigorous administrator intolerant of dishonesty and inefficiency. He was more contemptuous of Lincoln than ever, he would constantly be denouncing his imbecility, and it is incredible that kind friends were wanting to convey his opinion to Lincoln. Lincoln made him Secretary of War.

Since the summer, to the impatient bewilderment of the Northern people, of Congress, now again in Session, and of the President himself, their armies in the field were accomplishing just nothing at all, and, as this agitating year, 1861, closed, a deep gloom settled on the North, to be broken after a while by the glare of recurrent disaster.

CHAPTER IX

THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH

1. Military Policy of the North.

THE story of the war has here to be told from the point of view of the civilian administrator, the President; stirring incidents of combat and much else of interest must be neglected; episodes in the war which peculiarly concerned him, or have given rise to controversy about him, must be related lengthily. The President was an inexperienced man. It should be said, too-for respect requires perfect frankness-that he was one of an inexperienced people. The Americans had conquered their independence from Great Britain at the time when the ruling factions of our country had reached their utmost degree of inefficiency. They had fought an indecisive war with us in 1812-14, while our main business was to win at Salamanca and Vittoria. These experiences in some ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the war throughout easier to follow.

Immediately after Bull Run McClellan had been summoned to Washington to command the army of the Potomac. In November, Scott, worn out by infirmity, and finding his authority slighted by "my ambitious junior," retired, and thereupon, McClellan, while retaining his immediate command upon the Potomac, was made for the time General-in-Chief over all the armies of the North. There were, it should be repeated, two other principal armies besides that of the Potomac :

the army of the Ohio, of which General Buell was given command in July; and that of the West, to which General Halleck was appointed, though Frémont seems to have retained independent command in Missouri. All these armies were in an early stage of formation and training, and from a purely military point of view there could be no haste to undertake a movement of invasion with any of them.

Three distinct views of military policy were presented to Lincoln in the early days. Scott, as soon as it was clear that the South meant real fighting, saw how serious its resistance would be. His military judgment was in favour of a strictly defensive attitude before Washington; of training the volunteers for at least four months in healthy camps; and of then pushing a large army right down the Mississippi valley to New Orleans, making the whole line of that river secure, and establishing a pressure on the South between this Western army and the naval blockade which must slowly have strangled the Confederacy. He was aware that public impatience might not allow a rigid adherence to h's policy, and in fact, when his view was made public before Bull Run, "Scott's Anaconda," coiling itself round the Confederacy, was the subject of general derision. The view of the Northern public and of the influential men in Congress was in favour of speedy and, as it was hoped, decisive action, and this was understood as involving, whatever else was done, an attempt soon to capture Richmond. In McClellan's view, as in Scott's, the first object was the full preparation of the Army, but he would have wished to wait till he had a fully trained force of 273,000 men on the Potomac, and a powerful fleet with many transports to support his movements; and, when he had all this, to move southwards in irresistible force, both advancing direct into Virginia and landing at points on the coast, subduing each of the Atlantic States of the Confederacy in turn. If the indefinite delay and the overwhelming force which his fancy pictured could have been granted him, it is plain, the military critics have said, that "he could not

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have destroyed the Southern armies-they would have withdrawn inland, and the heart of the Confederacy would have remained untouched." But neither the time nor the force for which he wished could be allowed him. So he had to put aside his plan, but in some ways perhaps it still influenced him.

It would have been impossible to disregard the wishes of those, who in the last resort were masters, for a vigorous attempt on Richmond, and the continually unsuccessful attempts that were made did serve a military purpose, for they kept up a constant drain upon the resources of the South. In any well-thoughtout policy the objects both of Scott's plan and of the popular plan would have been borne in mind. That no such policy was consistently followed from the first was partly a result of the long-continued difficulty in finding any younger man who could adequately take the place of Scott; it was not for a want of clear ideas, right or wrong, on Lincoln's part.

Only two days after the battle of Bull Run, he put on paper his own view as to the future employment of the three armies. He thought that one should "threaten" Richmond; that one should move from Cincinnati in Ohio, by a pass called Cumberland Gap in Kentucky, upon Knoxville in Eastern Tennessee; and that the third, using Cairo on the Mississippi as its base, should advance upon Memphis, some 120 miles further south on that river. Apparently he did not at first wish to commit the army of the Potomac very deeply in its advance on Richmond, and he certainly wished throughout that it should cover Washington against any possible attack. Memphis was one of the three points at which the Southern railway system touched the great river and communicated with the States beyond -Vicksburg and New Orleans, much further south, were the others. Knoxville again is a point, by occupying which, the Northern forces would have cut the direct railway communication between Virginia and the West, but for this move into Eastern Tennessee Lincoln had other reasons nearer his heart. The people of that

region were strongly for the Union; they were invaded by the Confederates and held down by severe coercion, and distressing appeals from them for help kept arriving through the autumn; could they have been succoured and their mountainous country occupied by the North, a great stronghold of the Union would, it seemed to Lincoln, have been planted securely far into the midst of the Confederacy. Therefore he persistently urged this part of his scheme on the attention of his generals. The chief military objection raised by Buell was that his army would have to advance 150 miles from the nearest base of supply upon a railway; (for 200 miles to the west of the Alleghanies there were no railways running from north to south). To meet this Lincoln, in September, urged upon a meeting of important Senators and Representatives the construction of a railway line from Lexington in Kentucky southwards, but his hearers, with their minds narrowed down to an advance on Richmond seem to have thought the relatively small cost in time and money of this work too great. Lincoln still thought an expedition to Eastern Tennessee practicable at once, and it has been argued from the circumstances in which one was made nearly two years later that he was right. It would, one may suppose, have been unwise to separate the armies of the Ohio and of the West so widely; for the main army of the Confederates in the West, under their most trusted general, Albert Sidney Johnston, was from September onwards in South-western Kentucky, and could have struck at either of these two Northern armies; and this was in Buell's mind. On the other hand, Lincoln's object was a wise one in itself and would have been worth some postponement of the advance along the Mississippi, if thereby the army in the West could have been used in support of it. However this may be, the fact is that Lincoln's plan, as it stood, was backed up by McClellan; McClellan was perhaps unduly anxious for Buell to move on Eastern Tennessee, because this would have supported the invasion of Virginia which he himself was now contemplating, and he was probably