and how composed and equipped was necessary for a particular enterprise, whether in given conditions of roads, weather, supplies, and previous fatigue, a movement was practicable, and how long it would take any clever subaltern with actual experience of campaigning ought to have been a better judge than he.  The test, which the reader must be asked to apply to his conduct of the war, is whether he followed, duly or unduly his own imperfect judgment, whether, on the whole, he gave in whenever it was wise to the generals under him, and whether he did so without losing his broad view or surrendering his ultimate purpose.  It is really no small proof of strength that, with the definite judgments which he constantly formed, he very rarely indeed gave imperative orders as Commander-in-Chief, which he was, to any general.  The circumstances, all of which will soon appear, in which he was tempted or obliged to do so, are only the few marked exceptions to his habitual conduct.  There are significant contrary instances in which he abstained even from seeking to know his general’s precise intentions.  At the time which has just been reviewed, when the scheme of the war was in the making, his correspondence with Buell and Halleck shows his fundamental intention.  He emphatically abstains from forcing them; he lucidly, though not so tactfully as later, urges his own view upon the consideration of his general, begging him, not necessarily to act upon it, but at least to see the point, and if he will not do what is wished, to form and explain as clearly a plan for doing something better.

2. The War in the West Up to May, 1862.

The pressure upon McClellan to move grew stronger and indeed more justifiable month after month, and when at last, in March, 1862, McClellan did move, the story of the severest adversity to the North, of Lincoln’s sorest trials, and, some still say, his gravest failures, began.  Its details will concern us more than those of any other part of the war.  But events in the West began earlier, proceeded faster, and should be told first.  Buell could not obtain from McClellan permission to carry out his own scheme.  He did, however, obtain permission for Halleck, if he consented, to send flotillas up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers to make a diversion while Buell, as Lincoln had proposed and as McClellan had now ordered, marched upon Eastern Tennessee.  Halleck would not move.  Buell prepared to move alone, and in January, 1862, sent forward a small force under Thomas to meet an equally small Confederate force that had advanced through Cumberland Gap into Eastern Kentucky.  Thomas won a complete victory, most welcome as the first success since the defeat of Bull Run, at a place called Mill Springs, far up the Cumberland River towards the mountains.  But at the end of January, while Buell was following up with his forces rather widely dispersed because he expected no support from Halleck, he was brought to a stop, for Halleck, without warning, did make an important movement of his own, in which he would need Buell’s support.