Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[509] stream, where Gen. Lee's army had been stationed during the winter. On the Federal side a new and important actor was to appear on the scene. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had had a long run of success in the West, had been appointed lieutenant-general and commander-in-chief of all the Federal forces, and was now to answer the expectation of his admirers by a campaign in Virginia and the repetition of the enterprise upon the Confederate capital. The Richmond journals complimented him as a “mar of far more energy and ability than any that had yet commanded the Army of the Potomac,” but “his performances would bear no comparison whatever to those of Gen. Lee.”

The new Federal commander in Virginia was one of the most remarkable accidents of the war. That a man without any marked ability, certainly without genius, without fortune, without influence, should attain the position of leader of all the Federal armies, and stand the most conspicuous person on that side of the war, is a phenomenon which would be inexplicable among any other people than the sensational and coarse mobs of admiration in the North. Gen. Grant's name was coupled with success; and this circumstance alone, without regard to merit of personal agency, without reference to any display of mental quality in the event, was sufficient to fix him in the admiration of the Northern public. It mattered not that Grant had illustrated no genius; it mattered not that he had smothered Fort Donelson by numbers; it mattered not that he had succeeded at Vicksburg through the glaring incompetency of a Confederate commander, and by the weight of eighty thousand men against twenty odd thousand; the North was prepared to worship him, without distinguishing between accident and achievement, and to entitle him the hero of the war.

It is a curious commentary on the justice of popular judgment, that while Grant was thus elevated to power and fame, the man who rescued him at Perryville and again at Shiloh, and whose heroism and genius had saved there the consequences of his stupidity, should be languishing in obscurity. This man was Gen. Buell. It was he who had contributed most to Grant's success, and whose masterly maneuvers had done more to reclaim the Mississippi Valley for the Federals than any other commander, and who now had been sacrificed to the spirit of political intrigue. At a time when popular passion clamoured for the desolation of the South, Gen. Buell persisted, with a firmness rarer and more admirable even than he exhibited in the crisis of battle, in conducting the war on the principles of humanity; and by this noble moderation he incurred the displeasure of the faction that controlled the Government at Washington. The Radicals waged a war of extermination; but he proposed, with the sagacity of a statesman, to conciliate the good will of the South, while he overcame its resistance by an exertion of physical force. His system was too refined