intelligently provided for, and the generals had uniformly done their
best to carry them out.

But when it is considered that Grant's own staff, although presided
over by a very able man from civil life, and containing a number of
zealous and experienced officers from both the regular army and the
volunteers, was not organized for the arrangement of the multifarious
details and combinations of the marches and battles of a great
campaign, and indeed under Grant's special instructions made no efforts
to arrange them, it will be apparent that properly co-ordinated
movements could not be counted upon. When it is further considered that
Meade, Burnside, Butler, Hunter and afterwards Sheridan, as well as the
corps commanders, were left almost invariably to work out the details
for themselves, it will be seen that prompt, orderly, simultaneous and
properly co-operating movements on an extended scale, from different
parts of the same theatre of operations, and that properly combined
marches and battle movements were almost impossible. As a fact they
rarely ever took place, and it is not to be wondered at that the best
officers of every grade in the armies operating in Virginia found much
throughout the campaign, from beginning to end, to criticise and
complain of. Nor is it to be thought strange that many of their best
movements were successful rather because of good luck than of good
management, or failed rather because of their defective execution, than
by the enemy's better arrangements or superior generalship, though it
is evident that the Confederates kept their forces better in hand and
operated more in masses than did the Union generals. Their
organizations were simpler and more compact, their generals were better
chosen and better supported. Operating generally on the defensive and
fighting behind breastworks whenever it was possible, it was all the
more necessary to bring overwhelming forces to bear against them, in