a double river route into the heart of the Southern Confederacy, which he proposed to make still further available by an immediate advance upon Nashville and other strategic points the possession of which would give him an open pathway to the Gulf itself.

This was all that common-sense required Grant to report for the information of his superiors, and he reported precisely that. But those office-housed superiors held him guilty of neglect in that he had not given in detail the position of every regiment and brigade and battery that had helped to win the victory. In punishment of this neglect of infinitely petty detail and also in emphasis of the fact that Grant was after all only a general of volunteers who had presumed to win unauthorized victories in no way assigned to him to win-Grant was called back from his advance for the conquest of those strategic points that lay so easily within his grasp and ordered instead to remain where he was and to let slip from his hands the ripe fruits of his victory.

Was there ever anything so absurd as this, outside of comic opera-this and the extraordinary reign of incapacity in the Confederate army and Government? That was of like kind and quality.

The simple fact, of which the historian is obliged to take account, is that if ordinary common-sense and the commonest forms of military sagacity had been in control on either side at the beginning of the warif the men able to do things had been permitted to do them the struggle must almost certainly have ended within a few months after its beginning; tens, yes, scores and hundreds of thousands of lives must have

been spared and multitudes of millions in expenditure and in the destruction of property would have been saved to the American people.

That however was not to be. It was written in the Book of Fate that for a time incapacity, selfseeking, narrow-minded, jealousy of rank, and other like forces of the coarse and the commonplace were to rule about equally on the one side and on the other, and that thus the war was to be prolonged at terrible cost of sorrow and suffering and slaughter.

This was the situation in the West at the time when McClellan was drilling his men around Washington, while Beauregard and Johnston were futilely fortifying at Centreville to meet an assault that only the writer of nonsense rhymes could at that time have regarded as possible, and the victorious Federal forces on the Carolina coasts were succumbing to the lassitude which that climate invites, making no vigorous efforts to conquer the exposed and indefensible Confederate lines of communication in that quarter.

Grant had a force of commanding numbers in the neighborhood of Forts Henry and Donelson. His army had been swelled to 27,000 men. Buell had as many more men-some of them battle-seasoned-at Louisville and south of that city. There were other forces in eastern Kentucky under capable commanders, which could easily have been brought to bear, forming an army of more than 100,000 men in support of any southward movement that might be undertaken. The movement which naturally suggested itself to an aggressive military mind was one against Nashville, with an eye to the penetration of

the South from that point as a base of supplies. The "march to the sea" was as easy a possibility then as when Sherman made it years later.

This was Grant's idea, and it had behind it the eminent common-sense which usually inspired and informed that very practical general's plans. His purpose was to march with an overwhelming force, from Nashville to the Gulf. He could have done this easily and certainly, had he been permitted to undertake it with the forces then available. But, as we have seen, his purpose was brought to naught by the veto of General Halleck, whose notion of strategy seems to have been to let his enemy determine where and when the fighting should occur.

Nevertheless the Southerners, seeing the strategic situation far more clearly than Halleck did, abandoned Nashville and Federal troops of Buell's army promptly occupied that city. Thus Grant's success was saved to the country in some small and insignificant measure, though Grant was himself suspended from command and compelled to wait in inglorious ease until the Confederates by ceaseless and heroic efforts got together a great army in northern Mississippi, to meet which General Halleck found it necessary to call upon his most capable lieutenant, Ulysses S. Grant.

CHAPTER XXII

BETWEEN MANASSAS AND SHILOH-THE SITUATION IN VIRGINIA

It is necessary now to record what had meanwhile been going on in Virginia and elsewhere. At the beginning of November General George B. McClellan was placed in supreme command subject only to the President of all the armies of the United States. He was called "the young Napoleon," though upon what grounds of achievement that characterization was based it is difficult to conjecture. He was thirty-five years of age, and therefore young. He was a West Point graduate and an accomplished officer of engineers. He had been sent during the Crimean war to observe and report upon the organization and conduct of European armies. He had made a report admirable in its literary quality and expert in its observations. Later he had won distinction by his very capable conduct of that campaign in western Virginia which resulted in the division of the "pivotal" border state, and the arraying of its western half upon the Federal side. But neither in his deeds nor in the temper of his mind was there aught that could with propriety be called Napoleonic. He was given from first to last, as will appear hereafter, to the temperamental fault of exaggerating his enemy's strength and to a shrinking from conflict with a foe whose forces he thus overestimated.

Nevertheless, when McClellan was appointed to the supreme command of the Union armies after his months of organizing at Washington it was expected of him that he should at once advance upon Richmond and dictate terms of surrender in the Confederate capital itself.

He had found around Washington in the summer a state of affairs which must have hopelessly discouraged any commanding officer not altogether given over to optimism. It sadly discouraged McClellan. In words of his own he found at Washington "no army to command-a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home. There were," he added, "no defensive works on the southern approaches to the capital. Washington," he officially reported, "was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority." Is there any wonder that McClellan found it necessary to devote many months to the task of creating an effective army out of such stuff as this? Is there any escape from wonder that with the national capital thus hopelessly undefended, Beauregard and Johnston failed to advance upon and capture it?

This matter has been discussed in sufficient detail already in these pages. But it is worthy of note that the Confederate commanders who so strangely neglected their opportunities after the battle of Manassas, were not restrained by higher authority from the activity that was so obviously called for by the circumstances of the case, as Grant was after Donel