umphed in the field as the instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the Union—Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan—would have been ranged on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding men. But he put forward no general because that general was his man. He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved great were his discoveries.
The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so and so. It was a positive thing—the result of the active operations of a powerful genius, which the people
