This text is part of:
[3]
Even Mr. Ropes, in his championing of Buell the soldier, omits Buell the man. Now Buell, sulking over his wrongs, declined, when invited, to come back and take a command again.
He found his dignity more important to him than the Union.
Grant, meeting singular injustice after winning Donelson, has such words as these to say : “If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once.
I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms.”
Good authority rates Buell a more military soldier than Grant, and very likely he was. But Buell thought of himself and forgot his country, while Grant thought of his country and forgot himself.
Out of this very contrast a bright light falls, and we begin to see Grant.
Writing intemperately, his friends explain him as a sort of Napoleon ; his enemies, as a dull blunderer, accidentally reaping the glory which other people sowed.
These extremes meet in error.
We have not
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.