To a civilian reader the history of the war, in spite of the picturesque incidents of many battles, may easily be made dreary.  Till far on in the lengthy process of subjecting the South, we might easily become immersed in some futile story of how General X. was superseded by General Y. in a command, for which neither discovered any purpose but that of not co-operating with General Z. And this impression is not merely due to our failure to understand the difficulties which confronted these gallant officers.  The dearth of trained military faculty, which was felt at the outset, could only be made good by the training which the war itself supplied.  Such commanders as Grant and Sherman and Sheridan not only could not have been recognised at the beginning of the war; they were not then the soldiers that they afterwards became.  And the want was necessarily very serious in the case of the higher commands which required the movement of large forces, the control of subordinates each of whom must have a wide discretion, and the energy of intellect and will necessary for resolving the more complex problems of strategy.  We are called upon to admire upon both sides the devotion of forgotten thousands, and to admire upon the side of the South the brilliant and daring operations by which in so many battles Lee and Jackson defeated superior forces.  On the Northern side, later on, great generals came to view, but it is in the main a different sort of achievement which we are called upon to appreciate.  An Administration appointed to direct a stupendous operation of conquest was itself of necessity ill prepared for such a task; behind it were a Legislature and a public opinion equally ill prepared to support and to assist it.  There were in its military service many intelligent and many enterprising men, but none, at first, so combining intelligence and enterprise that he could grapple with any great responsibility or that the civil power would have been warranted in reposing complete confidence in him.  The history of the war has to be recounted in this volume chiefly with a view to these difficulties of the Administration.

One of the most interesting features of the war would, in any military study of it, be seen to be the character of the troops on both sides.  On both sides their individual quality was high; on both, circumstances and the disposition of the people combined to make discipline weak.  This character, common to the two armies, was conspicuous in many battles of the war, but a larger interest attaches to the policy of the two administrations in raising and organising their civilian armies.  The Southern Government, if its proceedings were studied in detail, would probably seem to have been better advised at the start on matters of military organisation; for instance, it had early and long retained a superiority in cavalry which was not a mere result of good fortune.  But here, too, there was an inherent advantage in the very fact