commanders, and of the unlikelihood of finding a successor to Meade as capable as he had shown himself to be, one shudders at the chances of what might have happened had another change of leaders been forced upon that long-suffering and now victorious army.  General Meade did not press his resignation after Halleck’s conciliatory telegrams, and remained in immediate command of the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war—­Grant’s accession to the chief command of all the armies having marked the end of the well-meant but often ill-advised and troublesome interference with military affairs from Washington.

Mr. Isaac R. Pennypacker, in his Life of General Meade, speaks of Halleck and other prominent officials in Washington in these terms:  “Possessing much of the skill of the lawyer and disputant, Halleck was without military ability.  The Secretary of War, like many other men who exercise vast power, was not great enough to refrain from the use of his authority in matters where his knowledge and experience did not qualify him to form the soundest views.  Acting with these military authorities were men like Wade and Chandler, whose patriotism was of the exuberant kind, whose judgment in military affairs was without value, but whose personal energy impelled them to have a controlling hand, if possible, in the conduct of the war.”

Lincoln’s dissatisfaction with General Meade after the battle of Gettysburg was due, as we now see, to his elation over the splendid victory for the Union, his intense desire for further and overwhelming successes, and his failure (a quite natural one) to realize that what might seem desirable and feasible viewed from Washington might look very different to the practical and experienced men actually on the ground and familiar as he could not be with all the factors in the situation.[J] “He thought,” wrote General Halleck in an explanatory letter sent to Meade two weeks after his despatch of censure, “that Lee’s defeat was so certain that he felt no little impatience at his unexpected escape.”  Among military authorities, such a retreat as that of Lee after Gettysburg is hardly regarded as an “escape.”  If it were, then great must be the fault of Lee as a general in allowing the defeated armies of Burnside and Hooker to “escape” after the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, where their repulse was much worse than was Lee’s at Gettysburg.  That Lincoln’s first feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction with General Meade were greatly modified with fuller knowledge of the actual situation after the battle of Gettysburg is shown by a remark made by him to Senator Cameron, referring to Meade:  “Why should we censure a man who has done so much for his country because he did not do a little more?” And if any debt of recognition or of gratitude yet remained due from him, it was more than paid a few months later in the unsurpassed tribute at Gettysburg to “the brave men, living and dead,” who gained the victory on that hallowed field.