had any exceptional amount of intuition or of energy and it was
right to demand that a general with both these qualities should be
appointed if he could be found. But he was at least a prudent officer,
of fair capacity, doing his best. The criticisms upon him, of which the
well informed were lavish, were uttered without appreciation of practical
difficulties or of the standard by which he was really to be judged. So,
with far more justice than McClellan, he has been numbered among the
misused generals. Lincoln, there is no doubt, had watched his
proceedings, as he watched those of Rosecrans after him, with a feeling
of impatience, and set him down as unenterprising and obstinate. In one
point his Administration was much to blame in its treatment of the
Western commanders. It became common political talk that the way to get
victories was to treat unsuccessful generals almost as harshly as the
French in the Revolution were understood to have treated them. Lincoln
did not go thus far, but it was probably with his authority that before
Buell was removed Halleck, with reluctance on his own part, wrote a
letter referring to this prevalent idea and calculated to put about among
the Western commanders an expectation that whichever of them first did
something notable would be put over his less successful colleagues.
Later on, and, as we can hardly doubt, with Lincoln's consent, Grant and
Rosecrans were each informed that the first of them to win a victory
would get the vacant major-generalship in the United States Army in place
of his present volunteer rank. This was not the way to handle men with
proper professional pride, and it is one of those cases, which are
strangely few, where Lincoln made the sort of mistake that might have
been expected from his want of training and not from his native
generosity. But in the main his treatment of this difficult question was
sound. Sharing as he did the prevailing impatience with Buell, he had no
intention of yielding to it till there was a real prospect that a change
of generals would be a change for the better. When the appointment of
Thomas was proposed there really was such a prospect. When Rosecrans was
eventually put in Buell's place the result was disappointing to Lincoln,
but it was evidently not a bad appointment, and a situation had then
arisen in which it would have been folly to retain Buell if any capable
successor to him could be found; for the Governors of Indiana