The volumes which contain the official record of the proceedings of the Committee on the Conduct of the War are and always must be regarded as the most valuable single magazine of historical material relating to the Great Rebellion. They have been liberally used in the preparation of every important account of our civil strife yet published, and the men, who shall in the light of another century estimate the greatness and significance of that "throe of progress," will inevitably look in their pages to the graphic narratives of those who were parts of memorable movements and actors in famous battles as a means of information, and to the conclusions of those who prosecuted inquiries so zealously when the events were yet fresh in the memory as a source of guidance. Infallibility is not a human attribute, and the work of this committee was not free from misapprehension and mistake. Time, which has shown some of its errors and will correct others, has also sustained the essential justice of its most important conclusions, which will stand unreversed on the pages of impartial history.
But the chief value of the labors of this committee is not to be found in its collection of rich materials for the future chronicler. To its unrecorded but potent influence upon the conduct of the war, adequate justice has not yet been done. Its unwearied investigations constantly exposed corruption, incompetence, and insubordination, and placed in the hands of the authorities the means of discovering and punishing the knavish, the weak, and the disloyal. Its activity was a perpetual prompter to energy, and a vigilant detective by the side of inefficiency and disaffection. As the result of its labors, the unsuccessful, the half-hearted, and the traitorous gave way to the able and the patriotic; because of the knowledge of its relentless questioning, indolent men were vigilant, and laxity was transformed into vigor. Its unremitting labors stayed up the hands of the War Secretary in the heaviest hours of his great task, and usefully informed the counsels and shaped the decisions of the White House. If its every session had been permanently secret, and not a line of its proceedings existed as a public record, there would still remain an ineffaceable transcript of the results of its action in the correcting of mistakes of organization and that crushing of sham generalship which alone made final victory possible.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] In "The Republic" magazine of April, 1875.
[23] Edwin M. Stanton had succeeded Simon Cameron on Jan. 13. 1862.
[24] On Nov. 7, 1862.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE VIGOROUS PROSECUTION OF THE WAR.
