There have been earnest efforts to justify the fateful supineness of our army after this victory. We were without transportation means, and a retreating army always outruns its pursuers, said Johnston. Mr. Knight says Northrop had left us without commissary supplies, and of course men without anything to eat had to wait until they could be fed. Beauregard says we ought to have made for the upper Potomac, which was fordable. All such reasons come from those who ignore the situation. A real general would have said to his soldiers, in the first moment of the panic, "You are weary; it will rest you to chase your flying foe; you can catch him because of the obstructing bridge. You are hungry; there are full haversacks and commissary wagons of your enemy just beyond Centerville without defenders. Forward, and escort the grand army into Washington city!" And such a general with just what infantry he could find to hand, all the while being re-enforced by eager men catching up, pressing forward as persistently as Blucher spurred with his cavalry after the French flying from Waterloo, would have been in sight of Washington when the sun rose. Mr. Knight sets forth very truly the incapacity of Davis as the military chieftain of the Confederate States.[132] I would abridge what can be said here under these heads: 1. Each particular army ought to have operated as a part of the whole force of the confederacy, and that whole force ought to have been wielded as one machine. Instead of trying to effect this end, the president decided that all exposed points must be defended. The result was that these were taken one after another by superior armies. A military man will understand me when I say his strategy was below mediocrity. True strategy dictated the abandonment of many places in order to assemble by using our shorter interior lines a resistless power on a really decisive occasion. McClellan, in Virginia, and Grant, in Mississippi, ought each to have been captured as Burgoyne and Cornwallis were. 2. He selected his generals and important officers according to his likes and dislikes, and not according to their true qualifications. 3. He was without practical administrative talent in any high degree. Such a man as Joseph E. Brown, of Georgia, would have shown far superior to him.