own.
He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were
practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters
would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then
his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope
declares he never made. When his environment had in this way aroused
prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher
officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose
soldiers were discouraged by defeat. He was expected to oppose skilful
and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis
as he tried to wield them. Only supreme genius could have wrought
success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess. He
was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired
to do his best for his country. In the West he had proceeded usefully
and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was
taken for the new place. I hope that history will deal kindly with
him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not
live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.

In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came
home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left
for a vacation and powder-smoke. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken
place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that
we might confidently settle down to peace. When going west to Buffalo
for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the
occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the
Rev. Samuel J. May. Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by
nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he
had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his
principles. Entering Mr. May's quiet study I found him in intimate
talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen's dress, marked by
no distinction of face or figure. He might have been a delegate to
a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a
professional brother. What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced
him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps,
who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the
moment and had dropped in for a friendly call. Slocum had been in the
thick of most of the bitter Virginia battles from the first, and all
the w