ides studying their
record, conversed both with Lee and with Moltke, thought Lee even
greater than Moltke, and the military writers of our day speak of him
as one of the great commanders of history. As to Jackson, Lee's belief
in him is sufficient testimony to his value. And the good fortune of
the South was not confined to these two signal instances. Most of the
Southern generals who appeared early in the war could be retained in
important commands to the end.

The South might have seemed at first equally fortunate in the character
of the Administration at the back of the generals. An ascendency was
at once conceded to Jefferson Davis, a tried political leader, to which
Lincoln had to win his way, and the past experiences of the two men had
been very different. The operations of war in which Lincoln had taken
part were confined, according to his own romantic account in a speech
in Congress, to stealing ducks and onions from the civil population;
his Ministers were as ignorant in the matter as he; their military
adviser, Scott, was so infirm that he had soon to retire, and it proved
most difficult to replace him. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand,
started with knowledge of affairs, including military affairs; he had
been Secretary of War in Pierce's Cabinet and Chairman of the Senate
Committee on War since then; above all, he had been a soldier and had
commanded a regiment with some distinction in the Mexican War. It is
thought that he would have preferred a military command to the
Presidency of the Confederacy, and as his own experience of actual war
was as great as that of his generals, he can hardly be blamed for a
disposition to interfere with them at the beginning. But military
historians, while criticising (perhaps a little hastily) all Lincoln's
interventions in the affairs of war up to the time when he found
generals whom he trusted, insist that Davis' systematic interference
was far more harmful to his cause; and Wolseley, who watched events
closely from Canada and who visited the Southern Army in 1863, is most
emphatic in this opinion. He interfered with Lee to an extent which
nothing but Lee's devoted friendship and loyalty could have made
tolerable. He put himself into relations of dire hostility with Joseph
Johnston, and in 1864 suspended him in the most injudicious manner.
Above all, when the military position of the South had begun to be
acutely perilous, Jefferson Davis neither devised for him