North_.

The story of the war has here to be told from the point of view of the
civilian administrator, the President; stirring incidents of combat and
much else of interest must be neglected; episodes in the war which
peculiarly concerned him, or have given rise to controversy about him,
must be related lengthily. The President was an inexperienced man. It
should be said, too--for respect requires perfect frankness--that he
was one of an inexperienced people. The Americans had conquered their
independence from Great Britain at the time when the ruling factions of
our country had reached their utmost degree of inefficiency. They had
fought an indecisive war with us in 1812-14, while our main business
was to win at Salamanca and Vittoria. These experiences in some ways
warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps
survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his
position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained.
An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first
involved may make the chief incidents of the war throughout easier to
follow.

Immediately after Bull Run McClellan had been summoned to Washington to
command the army of the Potomac. In November, Scott, worn out by
infirmity, and finding his authority slighted by "my ambitious junior,"
retired, and thereupon McClellan, while retaining his immediate command
upon the Potomac, was made for the time General-in-Chief over all the
armies of the North. There were, it should be repeated, two other
principal armies besides that of the Potomac: the army of the Ohio, of
which General Buell was given command in July; and that of the West, to
which General Halleck was appointed, though Fremont seems to have
retained independent command in Missouri. All these armies were in an
early stage of formation and training, and from a purely military point
of view there could be no haste to undertake a movement of invasion
with any of them.

Three distinct views of military policy were presented to Lincoln in
the early days. Scott, as soon as it was clear that the South meant
real fighting, saw how serious its resistance would be. His military
judgment was in favour of a strictly defensive attitude before
Washington; of training the volunteers for at least four months in
healthy camps; and of then pushing a large army right down the
Mississippi valley to New Orleans, making the whole line of th