vely together. The
orders issued from the different headquarters were necessarily lacking
in uniformity of style and expression, and failed to secure that prompt
and unfailing obedience that in operations extending over so wide and
difficult a field was absolutely essential, and this was entirely
independent of the merits of the different generals or the
peculiarities of their Chiefs of Staff and Adjutants General. The
forces were too great; they were scattered too widely over the field of
operations; the conditions of the roads, the width of the streams and
the broken and wooded features of the battle fields were too various,
and the means of transport and supply were too inadequate to permit of
simultaneous and synchronous movements, even if they had been
intelligently provided for, and the generals had uniformly done their
best to carry them out.

But when it is considered that Grant's own staff, although presided
over by a very able man from civil life, and containing a number of
zealous and experienced officers from both the regular army and the
volunteers, was not organized for the arrangement of the multifarious
details and combinations of the marches and battles of a great
campaign, and indeed under Grant's special instructions made no efforts
to arrange them, it will be apparent that properly co-ordinated
movements could not be counted upon. When it is further considered that
Meade, Burnside, Butler, Hunter and afterwards Sheridan, as well as the
corps commanders, were left almost invariably to work out the details
for themselves, it will be seen that prompt, orderly, simultaneous and
properly co-operating movements on an extended scale, from different
parts of the same theatre of operations, and that properly combined
marches and battle movements were almost impossible. As a fact they
rarely ever took place, and it is not to be wondered at that the best
officers of every grade in the armies operating in Virginia found much
throughout the campaign, from beginning to end, to criticise and
complain of. Nor is it to be thought strange that many of their best
movements were successful rather because of good luck than of good
management, or failed rather because of their defective execution, than
by the enemy's better arrangements or superior generalship, though it
is evident that the Confederates kept their forces better in hand and
operated more in masses than did the Union generals. Their
organizations were simp