cusable blunder!

Defeat had freed Abraham Lincoln of fools and incompetents and armed him
with dictatorial powers. Victory had saddled on the Confederacy two
heroes destined to cripple its efficiency with interminable controversy,
sulking bitterness and personal ambitions. The halo of supreme military
genius which encircled the brows of Johnston and Beauregard with the
lifting of the smoke from the field of Bull Run grew quickly into two
storm clouds which threatened the life of the new Republic.

Johnston's contempt for Beauregard had from the beginning been outspoken
to his intimate friends. The battle had raised this little upstart to
his equal in rank! He claimed that the President had robbed him of his
true position in the Southern army through favoritism in the appointment
of Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee to positions of seniority to
which they were not entitled.

Johnston began a series of bitter insulting letters to the Confederate
President, complaining of his injustice and demanding his rights. Not
content with his letters to the Executive, Johnston poured his
complaints into the ears of his friends and admirers in the Confederate
Congress and began a systematic and determined personal campaign to
discredit and ruin the administration.

Among his first recruits in his campaign against Jefferson Davis was the
fiery, original Secessionist, Roger Barton. Barton had never liked
Davis. Their temperaments were incompatible. He resigned his position on
the staff of the President, allied himself openly with Johnston and
became one of the bitterest and most uncompromising enemies of the
government. His position in the Confederate Senate would be a powerful
weapon with which to strike.

The substance of Johnston's claim on which was founded this malignant
clique in Richmond was the merest quibble about the date of his
commission to the rank of full general. Because its date was later than
that of Robert E. Lee he felt himself insulted and degraded.

When the President mildly and good naturedly informed him that his
position of Quartermaster General in the old army did not entitle him to
a field command and that Lee's rank as field commander was higher, he
replied in a letter which became the text of his champions. Its
high-flown language and bombastic claims showed only too plainly that a
consuming ambition had destroyed all sense of proportion in his mind.

With uncontrolled passion he wrote to the P