In the West, merit had by this time brought to the surface the generals who later led us to successful victories.  Their distance from the central controlling power resulted in their being let alone to work out their own salvation.  Opposed to them had been some excellent but not the best of the Confederate leaders; while Virginia boasted the elite of the Southern troops, the strongest of the captains, and the most daring of the lieutenants, developed by the war.

Since the Russian campaign of Bonaparte, no such vast forces had been under arms.  To command these required not only the divine military spark, but hardly-acquired experience.  And the mimic war which the elements of European army life always affords had been wanting to educate our generals.  It is not wonderful, then, that two years of fruitless campaigning was needed to teach our leaders how to utilize on such difficult terrain material equally vast in extent and uncouth in quality.  For, however apt the American to learn the trade of war,—­or any other,—­it is a moot-point whether his independence of character is compatible with the perfect soldier, as typified in Friedrich’s regiments, or the Old Guard.

But ability, native or acquired, forced its way to the front; and the requisite experience was gradually gained, for the school was one where the trade was quickly taught.  Said Gen. Meade on one occasion, “The art of war must be acquired like any other.  Either an officer must learn it at the academy, or he must learn it by experience in the field.  Provided he has learned it, I don’t care whether he is a West-Pointer, or not.”

In the East, then, the army had been led by McDowell, McClellan, Pope, and Burnside, to victory and defeat equally fruitless.  The one experiment so far tried, of giving the Army of the Potomac a leader from the West, culminating in the disaster of the second Bull Run, was not apt to be repeated within the year.  That soldier of equal merit and modesty, whom the Army of the Potomac had been gradually educating as its future and permanent leader, was still unpretentiously commanding a corps, and learning by the successes and failures of his superiors.  And who shall say that the results accomplished by Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and Meade, were not largely due to their good fortune in not being too early thrust to the front?  “For,” as says Swinton, “it was inevitable that the first leaders should be sacrificed to the nation’s ignorance of war.”

In the South, the signs of exhaustion had not yet become grave.  The conscription act, passed in April, 1862, had kept the ranks full.  The hope of foreign intervention, though distant, was by no means wholly abandoned.  Financial matters had not yet assumed an entirely desperate complexion.  Nor had the belief in the royalty of cotton received its coup de grace.  The vigor and courage of the Confederacy were unabated, and the unity of parties in the one object of resistance to invasion doubled