Thus Chattanooga, which it was hoped would be occupied soon after Halleck had occupied Corinth, remained in Southern hands for more than a year after that, notwithstanding the removal of Buell, to whom this disappointment and the mortifying invasion of Kentucky were at first attributed.  This was rightly felt to be unsatisfactory, but the chief blame that can now be imputed falls upon the mistakes of Halleck while he was still commanding in the West.  There is no reason to suppose that Buell had any exceptional amount of intuition or of energy and it was right to demand that a general with both these qualities should be appointed if he could be found.  But he was at least a prudent officer, of fair capacity, doing his best.  The criticisms upon him, of which the well informed were lavish, were uttered without appreciation of practical difficulties or of the standard by which he was really to be judged.  So, with far more justice than McClellan, he has been numbered among the misused generals.  Lincoln, there is no doubt, had watched his proceedings, as he watched those of Rosecrans after him, with a feeling of impatience, and set him down as unenterprising and obstinate.  In one point his Administration was much to blame in its treatment of the Western commanders.  It became common political talk that the way to get victories was to treat unsuccessful generals almost as harshly as the French in the Revolution were understood to have treated them.  Lincoln did not go thus far, but it was probably with his authority that before Buell was removed Halleck, with reluctance on his own part, wrote a letter referring to this prevalent idea and calculated to put about among the Western commanders an expectation that whichever of them first did something notable would be put over his less successful colleagues.  Later on, and, as we can hardly doubt, with Lincoln’s consent, Grant and Rosecrans were each informed that the first of them to win a victory would get the vacant major-generalship in the United States Army in place of his present volunteer rank.  This was not the way to handle men with proper professional pride, and it is one of those cases, which are strangely few, where Lincoln made the sort of mistake that might have been expected from his want of training and not from his native generosity.  But in the main his treatment of this difficult question was sound.  Sharing as he did the prevailing impatience with Buell, he had no intention of yielding to it till there was a real prospect that a change of generals would be a change for the better.  When the appointment of Thomas was proposed there really was such a prospect.  When Rosecrans was eventually put in Buell’s place the result was disappointing to Lincoln, but it was evidently not a bad appointment, and a situation had then arisen in which it would have been folly to retain Buell if any capable successor to him could be found; for the Governors of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois,