tever
grounds for leniency might have existed, it turns the whole business
into a farce when they were made the basis of a promotion in the
revised list six months later. To add to the perfection of the
story, Mrs. Turchin had acted on her own responsibility, and the
colonel did not know of the result till he had gone home, and in an
assembly of personal friends who called upon him ostensibly to cheer
him in his doleful despondency, his wife brought the little drama to
its _denouement_ by presenting him with the appointment in their
presence.

One of the worst features of the method of appointment by "slate"
made up between congressmen and the executive was that it filled up
every place allowed by law, and left nothing to be used as a
recognition for future services in the field, except as vacancies
occurred, and these were few and far between. The political
influences which determined the appointment were usually powerful
enough to prevent dismissal. Whoever will trace the employment of
officers of the highest grades in the last half of the war, will
find large numbers of these on unimportant and nominal duty, whilst
their work in the active armies was done by men of lower grade, to
whom the appropriate rank had to be refused. The system was about as
bad as could be, but victory was won in spite of it. It was
fortunate, on the whole, that we did not have the grades of
lieutenant-general and general during the war, as the Confederates
had. They made the one the regular rank of a corps commander and the
other of the commander of an army in the field. With us the
assignment of a major-general by the President to command a corps
gave him a temporary precedence over other major-generals not so
assigned, and in like manner for the commander of an army.
[Footnote: Our system was essentially that of the first French
Republic and the Consulate, under which any general of division was
assignable to an army command in chief.] If these were relieved,
they lost the precedence, and thus there was a sort of temporary
rank created, giving a flexibility to the grade of major-general,
without which we should have been greatly embarrassed. Grant's rank
of lieutenant-general was an exceptional grade, made for him alone,
when, after the battle of Missionary Ridge, he was assigned to the
command of all the armies.

These opinions of mine are not judgments formed after the fact. The
weak points in our army organization were felt at the t