ed nations, and approved by the
Secretary of War, whose approval is considered equivalent to the
order of the President, by which alone, under the law, a medal of
honor can be granted. But at length these carefully considered
recommendations were disapproved by the Assistant Secretary of War,
on the ground that the soldier had only done his duty! He had only
done, or heroically tried to do until stricken down by the enemy's
fire, what his commander had ordered! Some other standard of
soldierly honor was set up, not involving obedience to orders nor
discharge of duty, but instead of that some act of each soldier's
own volition, as if what a nation most highly honored was independent
action of each one of its million of soldiers, without any special
regard to the orders of the commander-in-chief or any of his
subordinate commanders! Thus the most dearly bought honor of a
citizen of this great republic, intrusted by Congress to the
commander-in-chief of the army, to be duly awarded to his subordinates,
passed into the hands of an Assistant Secretary of War, to be
awarded by him under his own newly invented theory of soldierly
merit! After a laborious but vain attempt to obtain recognition
of the time-honored standard of soldierly honor and merit, the
general-in-chief was forced to admit that the new standard set up
by the Assistant Secretary of War did not afford him any intelligible
guide by which he could be governed in making his recommendations,
and hence he requested to be relieved _by the Secretary of War_
from consideration of such cases in future, presuming that the
vital question would thus, as a matter of course, receive the
_personal_ consideration of the _Secretary_. The formal action of
the "Secretary of War," relieving the general from that important
duty involving the honor of those under his command, was very
promptly made known to him. But now there is very good reason for
the belief that the honorable and very worthy Secretary knew nothing
at all of the whole transaction!

It was my good fortune to have had, by close personal association,
exact knowledge of the difficulties which my predecessors had
encountered, as well as, perhaps, a more modest ambition, and hence
to avoid some of those difficulties. Yet in view of the past
experience of all commanders of the army, from that of George
Washington with the Continental Congress down to the present time,
I advise all my young brother soldiers to l