orce. In the field he was a worse failure than ever
Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation
by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's
advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a
pachyderm of the toughest--too thick-skinned to be troubled by
the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with
unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil.
It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part
he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of
picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.

There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among
the civilian generals. At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see
sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen's dress, marked by no trait
which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his
bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow.
This was Major-General John Pope. His son was in our university and
his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope
seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an
incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more
abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope
and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends
him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold
and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was
rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the
army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and
probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth
when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of '62.
It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the
Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the
place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put.
Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with
wrath and mortification. The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong
spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the
Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment. The new
General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble
one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and
forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his