should start although it could only be got together
in greatest haste and with the lack of equipment occasioned by the
"wear and tear" of the operations against Morgan. If, in insisting
on this, he had recognized the facts and given Burnside and his
troops credit for the capture of the rebel raiders and the
concentration, in a week, of forces scattered over a distance of
nearly a thousand miles, no one would have had a right to criticise
him. The exigency fairly justified it. But to treat Burnside as if
he had been only enjoying himself in Cincinnati, and his troops all
quietly in camp along the Cumberland River through the whole
summer,--to ignore the absence of the Ninth Corps and his own
suspension of a movement already begun when he took it away,--to
assume in almost every particular a basis of fact absolutely
contrary to the reality and to telegraph censures for what had been
done, under his own orders or strictly in harmony with them,--all
this was doing a right thing in as absurdly wrong a way as was
possible. A gleam of humor and the light of common sense is thrown
over one incident, when Mr. Lincoln, seeing that Burnside had full
right from the dispatches to suppose the Ninth Corps was to come at
once to him from Vicksburg and that no one had given him any
explanation, himself telegraphed that the information had been based
on a statement from General Grant, who had not informed them why the
troops had not been sent. "General Grant," the President quaintly
added, "is a copious worker and fighter, but a very meagre writer or
telegrapher. No doubt he changed his purpose for some sufficient
reason, but has forgotten to notify us of it." [Footnote: Official
Records, vol. xxiii. pt. ii. p. 561.] The reference to copious work
as contrasted with the _copia verborum_ gains added point from a
dispatch of Halleck to Rosecrans, quite early in the season, in
which the latter is told that the cost of his telegraph dispatches
is "as much or perhaps more than that of all the other generals in
the field." [Footnote: _Id_., p. 255.] The form of the reference to
Grant enables us also to read between the lines the progress he was
making in reputation and in the President's confidence. He kept
"pegging away," and was putting brains as well as energy into his
work. The records show also that Burnside took the hint, whether
intended or not, and in this campaign did not err on the side of
copiousness in dispatches to Washington.

T