Each of the three generals, including the General-in-Chief, who was the Government’s chief adviser, was set upon his own immediate purpose, and indisposed to understanding the situation of the others—­Buell perhaps the least so.  Each of them had at first a very sound reason, the unreadiness of his army, for being in no hurry to move, but then each of them soon appeared to be a slow or unenterprising commander.  Buell was perhaps unlucky in this, for his whole conduct is the subject of some controversy; but he did appear slow, and the two others, it is universally agreed, really were so.  As 1861 drew to a close, it became urgent that something should be done somewhere, even if it were not done in the best possible direction.  The political pressure upon the Administration became as great as before Bull Run.  The army of the Potomac had rapidly become a fine army, and its enemy, in no way superior, lay entrenching at Manassas, twenty miles in front of it.  When Lincoln grew despondent and declared that “if something was not done soon, the bottom would drop out of the whole concern,” soldiers remark that the military situation was really sound; but he was right, for a people can hardly be kept up to the pitch of a high enterprise if it is forced to think that nothing will happen.  Before the end of the year 1861 military reasons for waiting were no longer being urged; McClellan had long been promising immediate action, Buell and Halleck seemed merely unable to agree.

In later days when Lincoln had learnt much by experience it is hard to trace the signs of his influence in military matters, because, though he followed them closely, he was commonly in full agreement with his chief general and he invariably and rightly left him free.  At this stage, when his position was more difficult, and his guidance came from common sense and the military books, of which, ever since Bull Run, he had been trying, amidst all his work, to tear out the heart, there is evidence on which to judge the intelligence which he applied to the war.  Certainly he now and ever after looked at the matter as a whole and formed a clear view of it, which, for a civilian at any rate, was a reasonable view.  Certainly also at this time and for long after no military adviser attempted, in correcting any error of his, to supply him with a better opinion equally clear and comprehensive.  This is probably why some Northern military critics, when they came to read his correspondence with his generals, called him, as his chief biographers were tempted to think him, “the ablest strategist of the war.”  Grant and Sherman did not say this; they said, what is another thing, that his was the greatest intellectual force that they had met with.  Strictly speaking, he could not be a strategist.  If he were so judged, he would certainly be found guilty of having, till Grant came to Washington, unduly scattered his forces.  He could pick out the main objects; but as to how to economise effort, what force