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 12 contact here; no attempt at conciliation or persuasion. Sometimes the tone is injured, hurt, resentful: "While some have expressed surprise that my orders to you were not observed, I have at least hoped that you would recognize the desire to aid and sustain you, and that it would produce the corresponding action on your part." Sometimes it is brusque to roughness: "I do not perceive why a junction was not attempted, which would have made our force nearly equal in number to the estimated strength of the enemy and might have resulted in his total defeat under circumstances, which rendered retreat or reinforcement for him scarcely practicable." The president rates his second in command as if he were a refractory schoolboy. "The original mistakes in your telegram of 12th June would gladly have been overlooked as accidental, if acknowledged when pointed out. The perseverance with which they have been insisted on has not permitted me to pass them by as mere oversights." "It is needless to say that you are not considered capable of giving countenance to such efforts at laudation of yourself and detraction of others." "The language of your letter is, as you say, unusual, its insinuations unfounded, and its arguments utterly unbecoming from a general in the field to his superior." And the head of the Government is said to have gone even so far as, in speaking to Johnston's own former soldiers, to accuse their chief of actual disloyalty.

As I read this sort of thing, I cannot help being