s anything but flattering.
Hunter was probably well rid of his job and Halleck, whom Lincoln much
admired because he was "wholly for the service,"[199] had asked for
the entire command.[200]

[Footnote 197: Halleck, however, had not desired the inclusion of
Kansas in the contemplated new department because he thought that
state had only a remote connection with present operations.]

[Footnote 198: _Official Records_, vol. viii, 615-617.]

[Footnote 199: Thayer, _Life and Letters of John Hay_, vol. i,
127-128.]

[Footnote 200: Badeau, _Military History of U.S. Grant_, vol. i,
53, _footnote_.]

Halleck's plans for remodeling the constituent elements of his
department were made with a thorough comprehension of the difficulties
confronting him. It is not surprising that they brought General Denver
again to the fore. Hunter's troubles had been bred by local politics.
That Halleck well knew; but he also knew that Indian relations were a
source of perplexity and that there was no enemy actually in Kansas
and no enemy worth considering that would threaten her, provided her
own jay-hawking hordes could be suppressed. Her problems were chiefly
administrative.[201] For the work to be done, Denver seemed the
fittest man available and, on the nineteenth, he, having previously
been ordered to report to Halleck for duty,[202] was assigned[203] to
the command of a newly-constituted District of Kansas, from which
the troops,[204] who were guarding the only real danger zone,
the southeastern part of the state, were expressly excluded. The
hydra-headed evil of the western world then asserted itself, the
meddling, particularistic spoils system, with the result that Lane and
Pomeroy, unceasingly vigilant whenever and wherever what they regarded
as their preserves were likely to be encroached upon, went to
President Lincoln and protested against the preferment of Denver.[205]
Lincoln weakly yielded and wired to Halleck to suspend

[Footnote 201: Halleck to Stanton, March 28, 1862, _Official
Records_, vol. viii, 647-648.]

[Footnote 202:--Ibid., 612]

[Footnote 203:--Ibid., 832.]

[Footnote 204: Those troops, about five thousand, were left under
the command of George W. Deitzler, colonel of the First Kansas
(Ibid., 614), a man who had become prominent before the war in
connection with the Sharpe's rifles episode (Spring, _Kansas_,
60) and whose appointment as an Indian agent, early in 1861, had been
successfully opposed by Lane (