Nobody was ready for it, and nobody could quite understand it now that it was happening. But somehow it was being determined that democracy henceforth, perhaps for some centuries to come, would operate through a new instrument. Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.

A nation, from internal resources alone, carrying on for over eighteen months the most gigantic war of modern times, ever increasing in its magnitude, yet all this while growing richer and more prosperous!”1.

From first to last the Army of the Potomac was unlucky. It fought for four years, and it took more killing, proportionately, than any army in American history, and its luck was always out; it did its level best and lost; when it won the victory was always clouded by a might-have-been, and when at last the triumph came at Appomattox there were so very, very many of its men who weren’t there to see it.

I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.

Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead.” The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.

Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.

Kearny had probably seen more fighting than any man on the field. He had served in Mexico as a cavalry captain; had remarked, in youthful enthusiasm, that he would give an arm to lead a cavalry charge against the foe. He got his wish, at the exact price offered, a few days later, leading a wild gallop with flashing sabers and losing his left arm. He once told his servant: “Never lose an arm; it makes it too hard to put on a glove.

In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times – it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army – that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.

Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.