Lincoln had very much at heart.
Ever since the days in June, when President Lincoln had presided over
the council of war which discussed and decided upon the Bull Run
campaign, he had devoted every spare moment of his time to the study of
such military books and leading principles of the art of war as would
aid him in solving questions that must necessarily come to himself for
final decision. His acute perceptions, retentive memory, and unusual
power of logic enabled him to make rapid progress in the acquisition of
the fixed and accepted rules on which military writers agree. In this,
as in other sciences, the main difficulty, of course, lies in applying
fixed theories to variable conditions. When, however, we remember that
at the outbreak of hostilities all the great commanders of the Civil War
had experience only as captains and lieutenants, it is not strange that
in speculative military problems the President's mature reasoning powers
should have gained almost as rapidly by observation and criticism as
theirs by practice and experiment. The mastery he attained of the
difficult art, and how intuitively correct was his grasp of military
situations, has been attested since in the enthusiastic admiration of
brilliant technical students, amply fitted by training and intellect to
express an opinion, whose comment does not fall short of declaring Mr.
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