Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure.  On the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up.  As I ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed it with a crash and retired within.  Through a crevice in the blinds he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest.  His rule at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and dreaming of what the future had in store for him.  His burly frame was relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table.  I studied him at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose.  In those days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity and executive force.  In the field he was a worse failure than ever Banks had been.  In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation by Charles Francis Adams.  He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant’s advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a pachyderm of the toughest—­too thick-skinned to be troubled by the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil.  It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.

There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among the civilian generals.  At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen’s dress, marked by no trait which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow.  This was Major-General John Pope.  His son was in our university and his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend.  Pope seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an incompetent.  Probably no man of that time meant better or was more abused by capricious fate.  Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends him vigorously.  In the early years of the war he showed himself bold and active.  The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of ’62.