It was well that this was so, for a war
conducted by a cabinet or a congress could have ended only in disaster.
This peculiar character of the situation may not be readily admitted; it
is often convenient to deny and ignore facts in order to assert popular
theories; and that there was a real _master_ in the United States is a
proposition which many will consider it highly improper to make and very
patriotic to contradict. None the less, however, it is true, and by the
autumn of 1863 every intelligent man in the country _felt_ that it was
true. Moreover, it was because this was true, and because that master
was immovably persistent in the purpose to conquer the South, that the
conquest of the South could now be discerned as substantially a
certainty in the future.
Some other points should also be briefly made here. The war is to be
divided into two stages. The first two years were educational;
subsequently the fruits of that education were attained. The men who had
studied war as a profession, but had had no practical experience, found
much to learn in warfare as a reality after the struggle began. But
before the summer of 1863 there were in the service many generals, than
whom none better could be desired. "Public men" were somewhat slow in
discovering that their capacity to do pretty much everything did not
include the management of campaigns. But by the summer of 1863 these
"public" persons made less noise in the land than they had made in the
days of McClellan; and though political considerations could never be
wholly suppressed, the question of retaining or displacing a general no
longer divided parties, or superseded, and threatened to wreck, the
vital question of the war.
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