It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put.  Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with wrath and mortification.  The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment.  The new General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own.  He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were practically dictated by others.  The declaration that his headquarters would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, “then his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be,” Pope declares he never made.  When his environment had in this way aroused prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose soldiers were discouraged by defeat.  He was expected to oppose skilful and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis as he tried to wield them.  Only supreme genius could have wrought success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess.  He was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired to do his best for his country.  In the West he had proceeded usefully and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was taken for the new place.  I hope that history will deal kindly with him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.

In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left for a vacation and powder-smoke.  Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that we might confidently settle down to peace.  When going west to Buffalo for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the Rev. Samuel J. May.  Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his principles.  Entering Mr. May’s quiet study I found him in intimate talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen’s dress, marked by no distinction of face or figure.  He might have been a delegate to a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a professional brother.  What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps, who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the moment and had