Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/171

 united in himself the aptitude for military leadership with that for the conduct of civil—and especially republican—government. Such a happy combination of great qualities is exceedingly rare. Napoleon and Frederick the Great of Prussia can hardly be called great in the same category with Washington, for if they proved themselves to possess any genius for any species of civil government, it was certainly not government of the republican kind. Our own experience has been that the men with military titles elected to the presidency of the United States succeeded in the performance of the duties of the office, so far as they did succeed, by the abandonment of military methods and ways of thinking and by the cultivation, instead, of purely civil views and the practice of civic virtues. Nothing, for instance, would be more foreign to the genius of our government than the habit of command and the expectation of obedience on the part of the Chief Executive.

Here I may remark that of all the higher military officers I have known, none had a clearer intuitive conception of this than General Sherman. In the opinion of many competent persons, he was the ablest commander of them all. I remember a remarkable utterance of his when we were speaking of Grant's campaign. “There was a difference,” Sherman said, “between Grant's and my way of looking at things. Grant never cared a damn about what was going on behind the enemy's lines, but it often scared me like the devil.” He admitted, and justly so, that some of Grant's successes were owing to this very fact, but also some of his most conspicuous failures. Grant believed in hammering—Sherman in maneuvering. It had been the habit of the generals commanding the Army of the Potomac to cross the Rappahannock, to get their drubbing from Lee, and then promptly to retreat and recross the Rappahannock again. Grant crossed the Rappahannock,