On the other side, Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal lawyer, who knew nothing whatever of the military art, was a major-general by virtue of political influence alone, and as such outranked and dominated officers immeasurably his superiors. Think of Lee banished to the coast of South Carolina, while Beauregard and Johnston were needlessly fortifying at Centreville against an absurdly impossible advance of McClellan's forces. Think of McClellan himself in command of the most important Union army, while Grant and Sherman and George H. Thomas remained in subordinate positions!
And in the navy a similar discrimination against demonstrated capacity and in favor of mere "rank" equally prevailed. Farragut, with all his already and abundantly proved capacity, waited for the best part of a year before he could get permission to bring his great powers into play, and when at last he got such permission from the ignorant and arrogant civilians who dominated the navy department at Washington, it came to him with an insulting suggestion of doubt as to his courage, his patriotism and his capacity. That is a sad story to be told hereafter. Our present purpose is merely to show how lamely and incompetently the war was carried on on both sides during the first year of its progress. He who considers the simple facts is well nigh forced to the conclusion that had either side conducted its contest with half the brains and energy that came later into play it must have won at once.
[CHAPTER XX]
The First Appearance of Grant
The "pepper box" policy of employing small bodies of troops everywhere for the accomplishment of ends of no strategic consequence prevailed at Washington during all those early months of the war. The results of that policy are the despair of the historian who would intelligently trace the progress of the conflict from its beginning to its end. In very truth there was no progress. So far as the outcome of the war was concerned those events had no part to play; so far as the history of the war is concerned, any attempt to relate their insignificant stories would serve only to confuse the reader's mind, and to distract his attention from events and operations that bore directly upon the ultimate outcome of a struggle which involved the fate of the nation. Let us leave them aside as inconsiderable incidents and trace instead those significant happenings that served to determine the ultimate results.
The outcome of all great wars is determined in the end by the personality of the men who conduct them to a conclusion. Circumstances and even accidents have their part to play, but in the main it is personality that determines the event.
So at this point it becomes necessary to consider General Grant as a factor in the war, "a stone rejected of the builders," but destined to become the chief cornerstone, nevertheless, of Federal success.
General Grant was a West Point graduate ranking low in his class at graduation. He served for a time in the regular army with such capacity as to reach the rank of captain. Then he resigned, as many other officers did—Stonewall Jackson and William T. Sherman among the number—because the police duty which seemed to constitute the only function of the regular army offered no career to him. Captain Grant became first a farmer and later a clerk in his brother's business house at Galena, Illinois, upon a meager salary of $800 a year, which was eked out by the earnings of his slaves in Missouri. When the war broke out he offered his services to his country, asking for a restoration to the regular army. His application was not deemed worthy even of a reply. But presently a regiment of Illinois volunteers, more appreciative than the Washington authorities, made him its colonel, and after a little while he was promoted to be a brigadier-general of volunteers, but still without even so much as a second lieutenant's commission in the regular army.
In this volunteer capacity he was sent first to Missouri and later to Cairo in Illinois to command a wide district. He fought the battle of Belmont and after a partial victory he lost it. A few months earlier, learning that the Confederates, who were masters of Columbus, twenty miles down the Mississippi, were planning to seize upon Paducah, fifty miles up the Ohio, Grant had undertaken without orders an expedition against that town. He promptly captured it and thus defeated the Confederate program.