But when it is considered that Grant’s own staff, although presided over by a very able man from civil life, and containing a number of zealous and experienced officers from both the regular army and the volunteers, was not organized for the arrangement of the multifarious details and combinations of the marches and battles of a great campaign, and indeed under Grant’s special instructions made no efforts to arrange them, it will be apparent that properly co-ordinated movements could not be counted upon.  When it is further considered that Meade, Burnside, Butler, Hunter and afterwards Sheridan, as well as the corps commanders, were left almost invariably to work out the details for themselves, it will be seen that prompt, orderly, simultaneous and properly co-operating movements on an extended scale, from different parts of the same theatre of operations, and that properly combined marches and battle movements were almost impossible.  As a fact they rarely ever took place, and it is not to be wondered at that the best officers of every grade in the armies operating in Virginia found much throughout the campaign, from beginning to end, to criticise and complain of.  Nor is it to be thought strange that many of their best movements were successful rather because of good luck than of good management, or failed rather because of their defective execution, than by the enemy’s better arrangements or superior generalship, though it is evident that the Confederates kept their forces better in hand and operated more in masses than did the Union generals.  Their organizations were simpler and more compact, their generals were better chosen and better supported.  Operating generally on the defensive and fighting behind breastworks whenever it was possible, it was all the more necessary to bring overwhelming forces to bear against them, in order to ensure their final overthrow.  In addition to the defective organization and inefficient staff arrangements which have been mentioned, neither the Union government nor the Union generals ever made provisions, or seemed to understand the necessity, for a sufficient preponderance of force, to neutralize the advantages which the Confederate armies enjoyed, when fighting on the defensive, or to render victory over them reasonably certain.

Looking back over the long series of partial victories, vexatious delays and humiliating failures, and considering the inadequate organization and defective staff arrangements for which Grant was mainly responsible, it is evident that the terrible losses in the Union army in the overland campaign were due quite as frequently to the latter causes as to incompetency or lack of vigor on the part of the subordinate commanders.  The blind grapplings in the forests of the Wilderness could not be helped, when both armies were marching through it, for they could not see each other through the tangled underbrush till they were almost face to face, but it is now certain that if the marches of the Union