In the same way, after the Carolina coast forts were reduced, Lee was sent to a pestilential hole called Coosawhatchie, in South Carolina, to plan a defense of the railroad line between Charleston and Savannah, while Johnston and Beauregard were fortifying their victorious army against a foe that it had beaten into temporary helplessness. These two--Grant and Lee--were destined in the end to fight the war out to a conclusion. But in those earlier months of it neither was permitted to exercise his genius in any effective way, or to show in action what stuff he was made of. Lee indeed held high rank from the beginning and was the military adviser of the Confederate Government, but for a time his genius was dissipated on minor matters, while lesser men were wasting time. And as it was with the great captains so was it with their great lieutenants. William T. Sherman was an unconsidered, unconsulted lieutenant of McDowell. Stonewall Jackson and Ewell and Longstreet were the subordinates of Beauregard and Johnston. Grant and Sherman on the one side and Stonewall Jackson on the other, had lost caste in the military service by resigning from the regular army at a time when the service neither offered nor promised a career worthy of them. Inferior men therefore, who had been content with a meaningless routine, outranked and commanded these really great men after that code of military ethics and etiquette which assumes that the officer--even though he be a dullard--who has been longest in continuous service is fit to command the officer--whatever his genius may be--who has served for a briefer time or who, finding the service to be a stupid and meaningless routine of camp duty in time of peace, has resigned from it in search of better opportunities for the exercise of his abilities, and has returned to it only when duty to his country has seemed to call him. Thus the first year of the war was the period in which official incapacity ruled on both sides; the period in which technical rank overrode genius and trampled it to earth; the period in which the martinets were afflicted with victories which they were utterly incapable of turning to profitable account, and defeats which they knew not how to repair. A better era was approaching, but it came slowly. For a time Grant was to be dominated by Halleck. For a time Stonewall Jackson was destined to have his carefully considered disposition of forces in the valley of Virginia overridden and canceled by an ignorant civilian in Richmond, who knew so little of military courtesy as to send his orders direct and not through Jackson's commander Johnston.