appointed young civilians and business men as chiefs, having
under them some old routinists for the sake of technicalities of the
service. Such men would have done by far better than those old
intellectual drones. A merchant accustomed to carry on an extensive
and complicated business would have been by far a better
quartermaster-general--_Intendant des armees_--than the wholly
inexperienced Gen. Meigs. This last would serve as an aid to the
merchant. At the beginning of the war, I suggested to Senator Wilson
to import such quartermasters from France or Russia, men experienced
and accustomed to provide for armies of 100,000 men each. By paying
well, such men could have been easily found, and the military
medical and surgical bureau, as organized by Scott, was about sixty
years behind real science. These senile representatives of
non-science snubbed off Professor Van Buren of the New York
academy, to whom they compare as the light of a common match to that
of calcium. If men like Dr. Van Buren, Dr. Barker, and others of
real science from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc., had been
listened to, thousands and thousands of limbs and lives would have
been saved and preserved.

_January 25th._--Mr. Lincoln relishes the idea that if the cause of
the North is victorious, no one can claim much credit for it. I put
this on record for some future assumptions. Mr. Lincoln is the best
judge of the merits of his clerks and lieutenants. But Mr. Lincoln
forgets that the success will be due exclusively to the people--and,
_per contra_, he alone will be arrayed for the failure. His friends
and advisers, as the Sewards, the Weeds, the Blairs, the Hallecks,
will very cleverly wash their gored hands from any complicity with
him--Lincoln.

The army to be formed from Africo-Americans is to be entrusted to
converted conservatives. It is feared that sincere abolitionists if
entrusted with the command, may use the forces for some awful,
untold aims. It is feared that abolitionists once possessed of arms
and troops, may use them indiscriminately, and emancipate right and
left, by friend and foe, paying no attention to the shrieks of
border-States, of old women, of politicians, of cowards, of
Sewardites; nay, it is feared that genuine abolitionists may carry
too far their notions of absolute equality of races, and without
hesitation treat the white rebels with even more severity than they
threaten to treat loyal armed Africo-Americans. And