enemy are in my power, and God Almighty cannot deprive me of them.’  I have heard before of this, but not so direct and positive.  The sudden paralysis that followed, when the army in the midst of a successful career was suddenly checked and commenced its retreat, has never been explained.  Whiskey is said by Sumner to have done the work.  The President said that if Hooker had been killed by the shot which knocked over the pillar that stunned him, we should have been successful.”

[H] General T.R.  Tannatt, a graduate of West Point in 1858, is now (1913) an active and honored citizen of Spokane, Washington.

[I] The criticism of Meade for not attacking Lee before he recrossed the Potomac is based on the assumption that the attack must be successful.  On this point Meade’s words to Halleck, written in reply to the latter’s conciliatory letter of July 28, can hardly be ignored.  “Had I attacked Lee the day I proposed to do so, and in the ignorance that then existed of his position, I have every reason to believe the attack would have been unsuccessful, and would have resulted disastrously.  This opinion is founded on the judgment of a number of distinguished officers after inspecting Lee’s vacated works and position.  Among these officers I could name Generals Sedgwick, Wright, Slocum, Hays, Sykes, and others.”  In other words the attack which Meade has been so severely blamed for not making might have ended in reversing the results at Gettysburg, losing all we had gained at such terrible cost, placed Washington and other Northern cities in far more deadly peril, and changing the whole subsequent issues of the war.

[J] A curious revelation of the estimate of General Halleck held by at least one member of the Cabinet, and of the relations between Halleck and the President, is found in Welles’s Diary in the record of a rather free conversation with the President during the anxious period about the time of the battle of Gettysburg.  Says Mr. Welles:  “I stated I had observed the inertness if not the incapacity of the General-in-Chief, and had hoped that he [the President], who had better and more correct views, would issue peremptory orders.  The President immediately softened his tone, and said, ’Halleck knows better than I what to do.  He is a military man, has had a military education.  I brought him here to give me military advice.  His views and mine are widely different.  It is better that I, who am not a military man, should defer to him, rather than he to me.’  This,” continues Mr. Welles, “is the President’s error.  His own convictions and conclusions are infinitely superior to Halleck’s; even in military operations, more sensible and more correct always....  Halleck has no activity; never exhibits sagacity or foresight.”  And in another place in the same Diary we are given this singular picture by a Cabinet minister of the man who was at that moment the General-in-Chief of the Union armies and the military adviser of the President:  “Halleck sits and smokes, and swears, and scratches his arm, but exhibits little military capacity or intelligence; is obfuscated, muddy, uncertain, stupid as to what is doing or to be done.”