ught perhaps I might do something in the same
direction in later years. Be that as it might, I had no desire to
try again what so many others had failed to accomplish, but thought
it better to make an experiment with a less ambitious plan of my
own, which I had worked out while trying to champion the ideas
entertained by all my predecessors. At the request of General
Grant and General Sherman, when the one was President and the other
general of the army, I studied the subject as thoroughly as I was
capable of doing, and formulated a regulation intended to define
the relations between the Secretary of War, the general of the
army, and the staff departments. I still think that plan of my
great superiors, only formulated by me, would have worked quite
satisfactorily if it could have had general and cordial support.
Yet I do not think it was based upon the soundest view of the
constitutional obligations of the President as commander-in-chief
of the army, nor at all consistent with the practice in this country
of giving the command of the army to the officer happening to be
senior in rank, without regard to the "special trust and confidence"
reposed in him by the President for the time being. It was based
too much upon the special conditions then existing, wherein the
general of the army, no less than the Secretary of War, enjoyed
the confidence of the President in the highest degree. The plan
proposed to give far too great authority to the general, if he did
not, for whatever reason, enjoy the full confidence of the President.
It also trusted too much to the ability and disinterested fidelity
of the several chiefs of the staff departments. In short, it was
based upon a supposed higher degree of administrative virtue than
always exists even in this country.

However all this may be, the proposed regulation did not meet with
cordial support, so far as I know, from any but General Grant,
General Sherman, and General M. C. Meigs, then quartermaster-general.
The other bureau chiefs earnestly opposed it. It was near the end
of General Grant's second term, and no effort was made, so far as
I know, to adopt any regulation on the subject in the next or any
succeeding administration. The personal controversy between General
Scott and the Secretary of War many years before had resulted in
the repeal, through revision, of the old and quite satisfactory
regulation on the subject, and no other worthy of the name has ever
been a