March 2, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.-III. 
Some Lessons to be Learnt from it. 
By John Buchan. 
[Mr. John Buchan in these admirable articles points out 
the parallels that exist between the North in the 
American Civil War and Great Britain in the present 
conflict. Some of these arc extraordinarily exact, 
notahly the lack 0/ trained men and , the engrained 
objection to compulsory service ivhich President Lincoln 
in face of great opposition passed into law and which 
once it was law the country readily accepted.] 
THE North found the men ; after many months 
it found out the way to train them ; it had' 
also to find the riglit kind of leadership. 
Strength, even discipHned strength, is not 
enough. 
■ Lincohi, as we have seen, began the war without 
any kind of aptitude or experience. His Cabinet was in 
the same position. It contained several able men, such 
as Seward, Chase, and Stanton, and of these Stanton did 
his best to make it impossible for the President to con- 
tinue in office. Lincoln's most dangerous foes were those 
of his own household. It was not the first time in history 
that a great war had revealed members of Govern- 
ment intriguing against each other. Moreover, the 
North had no generals of such commanding ability and 
experience that they could safely be trusted. Again, 
the President of the I'nited States was in a peculiar 
position. Under the Constitution he was the chief execu- 
tive olficer of the country, and performed many of the 
functions which elsewhere belonged to the monarch. 
Lincoln, therefore, whether he wanted it or not, had to 
assume the direction of the war. 
We sometimes talk lightly as if the only thing in 
war was to find a good general and give him a free hand, 
rnfortunatelj" in a modern war, in which the existence of 
the nation is at stake, the matter is not nearly so simple. 
To beat the enemy you have not only to win field victories; 
or rather to win the right kind of field victory you must do 
more than turn out good troops and good generals. You 
have to use the whole national strength against your 
opponent, military, naval and economic, and therefore, 
unless the great soldier is also, like Napoleon, a great 
statesman, the supreme direction of the campaign must 
lie in the hands of a civilian Cabinet. That is to say," 
the Cabinet decides upon the main strategic plan, which 
involves all kinds of questions of policy, and having 
so decided it chooses the best men it can find to carry out 
the military and naval parts of it. Once these com- 
manders have been chosen they should not be interfered 
with. Till they ha\e failed they should be trusted. 
Now to discover and apply a continuous strategic 
policy you need a Cabinet loyal within itself, and a 
Cabinet instructed by the best expert advice which can 
be procured. Lincoln had an extremely disloyal Cabinet. 
All its members wanted to beat the South, but they all 
thought that thej' could do the job "better than the Presi- 
dent. They were amateurs, but 'unfortunately they 
believed that they were expferts. That was bad enough. 
In addition there was Congress, which was filled with a 
collection of talkative people who did their best to hamper 
the Government. Rarely has any representative assembly 
cut such a poor figure in a great'crisis as Congress did in 
the American Civil War. Artemus Ward said •the last 
word on the subject. He observed that at the previous 
election he had deUberately voted for Henry Clay. It was 
true, he said, that Henry was dead, but since all the 
politicians that he knew were fifteenth- rate he preferred 
to vote for a first-class corpse. 
There was also the Press, which was quite uncensored, 
and which spent its time in futile criticisms of generals 
and statesmen and in insisting upon policies which would 
have given the enemy a complete and speedy victorj'. It 
was always trying to make journalistic reputations for 
generals and so foist them upon the Government. But 
the worst thing of all was that there was no body of experts 
to advifc the Cabinet. There was no General Staff at 
Washington. The good soldiers were" all in the field. 
There had never been any real Staff in peace time and it 
was impossible to improvise one easily in war. Hence 
Lincoln had to conduct the campaign himself, with small 
assistance from his colleagues, with no help from Congress 
— very much the other way — with no real military expert 
advice at his elbow, and under a perpetual cross-fire of 
journalistic criticism. 
The First Northern Generals. 
The result might have been foreseen. The first 
generals were appointed largely because of political and 
journalistic clamour. Indeed it is difficult to see how 
they could have been appointed in any other way, for 
there were no real formed reputations. The good men 
had still to discover themselves. General after general 
failed and was recalled. Transient and protesting 
phantoms, they flit over the page of history. Some of 
them were men of real ability, like McClellan, who was 
enthusiastically hailed in the North as the " Young 
Napoleon." He failed, largely no doubt owing to Lincoln's 
interference, and he disappeared. Others succeeded, some 
of them competent men like Meade and Burnside, some of 
them by no means competent like Hooker and Pope and 
Banks. Lee used to complain in his gentle way that the 
North always dismissed its generals just as he was getting 
to know and like them. 
They usually began with flamboyant proclamations 
announcing that they were going to whip the rebels in a 
month, and then they were hunted from pillar to post 
by Lee and Jackson. Pope, for example, declared when 
he took command that his headquarters would be in the 
saddle ; and Lee, when he heard it, observed drily that 
that would be a more proper place for his hind-quarters. 
The chief army of the North, the Army of the Potomac, 
was commanded by no less than six generals, and all 
but one were dismissed for failure. But while these 
unfortunate people were degraded, all sorts of incom- 
petents who had strong political interest were retained 
in their commands. Most of the generals of the North 
had one leg in the camp and the other in Congress. It 
RAEMAEKERS' CARTOON. 
The Prime Minister repeated in clear and 
emphatic tones in the House of Commons last week, 
the pledge -which he had given at the Guildhall 
on November gth, 1914, using identical uords 7f''"' 
oite slight addition : — ■ 
We shall never sheathe the sword which we 
have not lightly drawn until Belgium and I 
will add Serbia — recovers in full measure all 
and more than all which she has sacrificed, 
until France is adequately secured against 
the menace of aggression, until the rights of 
the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed 
upon an unassailable foundation, and until 
the military domination of Prussia is wholly 
and finally destroyed. 
When this promise was originally made at the 
Guildhall, the cartoon which is reproduced as 
our frontispiece was drawn by Louis Raemaekers. 
It is evidence of the deep impression which the 
declaration made on the mind of Neutrals — an 
impression zahich has been increased by the em- 
phatic manner in ivhich the declaration was 
restated at Westminster last week. Germanv under- 
stands its significance. 
