"Why didn't you attack me on Friday?" the Northerner asked.
"I was not in command."
"If you had, my reënforcements could not possibly have reached me in time."
Buckner smiled grimly.
"In other words a little more promptness on one side, a little less resolute decision on the other—and the tables would have been turned!"
"That's just it," was the short answer.
It was an ominous day for the South. Bigger than the loss of the capital of Tennessee which Johnston evacuated the next day, bigger than the loss of fifteen thousand men and their guns loomed the figure of a new Federal commander. Out of the mud, and slush, ice and frozen pools of blood—out of the storm cloud of sleet and snow and black palls of smoke emerged the stolid, bulldog face of Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln made him a major general.