slender lines of
operation of our foremost armies. They had sent Grant to the right-about
from his first march on Vicksburg, thus neutralizing Sherman's
attempt at Chickasaw Bayou. They had compelled Buell to forfeit his
hardly-earned footing, and to fall back from the Tennessee River to
Louisville at the double-quick in order to beat Bragg in the race
towards the gate of the Northern States, which disaster was happily
soon retrieved by the latter's bloody check before Murfreesborough.
Yet, despite these back-sets, the general course of events showed that
Providence remained on the side of the heaviest battalions; and the
spring of 1863 saw our armies extended from the pivot midway between the
rival capitals in a more or less irregular line, and interrupted by the
Alleghany Mountains, to Vicksburg and the Father of Waters.

Great as was the importance of success in Virginia, the Confederates had
appreciated the fact as had not the political soldiers at the head of
the Federal department of war. Our resources always enabled us to keep
more men, and more and better material, on this battle-ground, than the
Confederates could do; but this strength was constantly offset by the
ability of the Southern generals, and their independence of action, as
opposed to the frequent unskilfulness of ours, who were not only never
long in command, but were then tied hand and foot to some ideal plan for
insuring the safety of Washington. The political conditions under which
the Army of the Potomac had so far constantly acted had never allowed it
to do justice to its numbers, mobility, or courage; while Mr. Lincoln,
who actually assumed the powers of commander-in-chief, technically
intrusted to him by the Constitution, was swayed to and fro by his
own fears for the safety of his capital, and by political schemes and
military obtuseness at his elbow.

Whether the tedious delays and deferred success, occasioned by these
circumstances, were not eventually a benefit, in that they enabled the
country to bring forth in the fulness of time the conditions leading to
the extinguishment of slavery, which an earlier close of the war
might not have seen; not to mention the better appreciation by either
combatant of the value of the other, which a struggle to the bitter end
alone could generate,--is a question for the political student. But
it will always remain in doubt whether the practical exhaustion of
the resources of the South was not a condition