merit; it hungered to find it; but many appointments must at first have been made in a haphazard fashion, for there was no machinery for sifting claims.  A zealous but unknown West-Pointer put under an outsider would be apt to write as Sherman did in early days:  “Mr. Lincoln meant to insult me and the Army”; and a considerable jealousy evidently arose between West-Pointers and amateurs.  It was aggravated by the rivalry between officers of the Eastern army and those of the, more largely amateur, Western army.  The amateurs, too, had something to say on their side; they were apt to accuse West-Pointers as a class of a cringing belief that the South was invincible.  There was nothing unnatural or very serious in all this, but political influences which arose later caused complaints of this nature to be made the most of, and a general charge to be made against Lincoln’s Administration of appointing generals and removing them under improper political influences.  This general charge, however, rests upon a limited number of alleged instances, and all of these which are of any importance will necessarily be examined in later chapters.

It may be useful to a reader who wishes to follow the main course of the war carefully, if the chief ways in which geographical facts affected it are here summarised—­necessarily somewhat dryly.  Minor operations at outlying points on the coast or in the Far West will be left out of account, so also will a serious political consideration, which we shall later see caused doubt for a time as to the proper strategy of the North.

It must be noted first, startling as it may be to Englishmen who remember the war partly by the exploits of the Alabama, that the naval superiority of the North was overwhelming.  In spite of many gallant efforts by the Southern sailors, the North could blockade their coasts and could capture most of the Southern ports long before its superiority on land was established.  Turning then to land, we may treat the political frontier between the two powers, after a short preliminary stage of war, as being marked by the southern boundaries of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, just as they are seen on the map to-day.  In doing so, we must note that at the commencement of large operations parts of Kentucky and Missouri were occupied by Southern invading forces.  This frontier is cut, not far from the Atlantic, by the parallel mountain chains which make up the Alleghanies or Appalachians.  These in effect separated the field of operations into a narrow Eastern theatre of war, and an almost boundless Western theatre; and the operations in these two theatres were almost to the end independent of each other.