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 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 149 triumph at the polls proved that the people of the north had decided to ' finish the work they had begun '. ' The great man of the Civil War was Lincoln. Lacking him the north would have abandoned the contest. His love of country and abnegation of self made him a worthy leader.' But Mr. Rhodes is fully aware of his hero's limitations. * Lincoln, plain and ungainly, gave no thought to the graces of life and lacked the accompUshments of a gentleman, as no one knew better than himself. He had no system in the disposition of his time or in the preparation of his work.' His lack of dignity and his grotesque eccentricities were sometimes painful to men of breeding and education. He carried more weight in the country, where he was known only by his official acts, than at Washington. Mr. Rhodes carefully points out Lincoln's mistakes, which were made mainly in the earlier period of the war. The first was the appointment of Cameron as secretary of war at the beginning of his administration, next his hesitation to give up Mason and Slidell before a formal demand had been made for their liberation. His selection of Hooker as Burnside's successor and his reluctance to part with him after Chancellorsville constituted another grave error of judgement. From Welles's diary Mr. Rhodes shows that it was not, as hitherto generally supposed, an intrigue on the part of Chase and the radicals that put and kept Hooker in command, but Lincoln's own deliberate choice. Finally Mr. Rhodes condemns the policy of arbitrary arrests and arbitrary inter- ference with the freedom of the press in states outside the theatres of war. Though the orders were issued by Seward and Stanton, and the harshness of these ministers was probably tempered by the president's clemency, yet the author contends that Lincoln must bear the ultimate responsibility for them, because he permitted them. ' He stands responsible for the casting into prison of citizens of the United States on orders as arbitrary as the lettres-de-cachet of Louis XIV.' The student of strategy and tactics will find little fresh information in these pages. Mr. Rhodes deliberately chooses as ' a layman ' to keep out of military controversies. In an historian so well endowed with the powers of research and discrimination this self-denial seems unnecessary. He ranks Grant high among generals, chiefly on the merits of his Vicksburg campaign, and places him above Jackson, though the lines on which he has drawn the comparison are not obvious. Indeed Mr. Rhodes hardly does justice to the great qualities either of Jackson or Lee. To dismiss the second Bull Run campaign as a succession of blunders on Pope's part is unfair to one of Lee's boldest and most brilliant operations. No version of the Gettysburg campaign can be satisfactory which fails to deal with Stuart's responsibility for depriving Lee of ' the eyes of his army ', and thus forcing him into an offensive battle, instead of the defensive one which he had intended to wage at Cashtown. Nor can Lee's tactics at Gettysburg be fairly judged without a more extended reference to the Lee-Longstreet controversy. He was not gambling on a desperate venture. This volume contains sixteen excellent maps, in some of which an attempt, not wholly successful, is made to compensate for the omissions in the narrative. W. B. Wood.