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 its effective strength. Perhaps this moment was the flood-tide
of Southern enthusiasm and confidence; which, after the Pennsylvania
campaign, began to ebb. It is not intended to convey the idea that the
South was prosperous. On the contrary, those who read the signs aright,
saw and predicted its approaching decline. But, as far as its power of
resistance went, it was at its highest when compared with the
momentarily lessened aggressiveness of the North. For the anti-war
party was doing its best to tie the hands of the administration; and,
while this in no wise lessened the flow of men and material to the front,
it produced a grave effect upon the moral strength which our chiefs were
able to infuse into their method of conducting the war.