if not indispensable, quality.  You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside’s command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honourable brother officer.  I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a dictator.  Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I gave you the command.  Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators.  What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.  The Government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders.  I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you.  Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness.  Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.”

“He talks to me like a father,” exclaimed Hooker, enchanted with a rebuke such as this.  He was a fine, frank, soldierly fellow, with a noble figure, with “a grand fighting head,” fresh complexion and bright blue eyes.  He was a good organiser; he put a stop to the constant desertions; he felt the need of improving the Northern cavalry; and he groaned at the spirit with which McClellan had infected his army, a curious collective inertness among men who individually were daring.  He seems to have been highly strung; the very little wine that he drank perceptibly affected him; he gave it up altogether in his campaigns.  And he cannot have been very clever, for the handsomest beating that Lee could give him left him unaware that Lee was a general.  In the end of April he crossed the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, which still divided the two armies, and in the first week of May, 1863, a brief campaign, full of stirring incident, came to a close with the three days’ battle of Chancellorsville, in which Hooker, hurt and dazed with pain, lost control and presence of mind, and, with heavy loss, drew back across the Rappahannock.  The South had won another amazing victory; but “Stonewall” Jackson, at the age of thirty-nine, had fallen in the battle.

Abroad, this crowning disaster to the North seemed to presage the full triumph of the Confederacy; and it was a gloomy time enough for Lincoln and his Ministers.  A second and more serious invasion by Lee was impending, and the lingering progress of events in the West, of which the story must soon be resumed, caused protracted and deepening anxiety.  But the tide turned soon.  Moreover, Lincoln’s military perplexities, which have demanded our detailed attention during these particular campaigns, were very nearly at an end.  We have here to turn back to the political problem of his Presidency, for the bloody and inconclusive battle upon the Antietam, more than seven months before, had led strangely to political consequences which were great and memorable.