Grant's conquest of Vicksburg and of the Mississippi river was a result inestimably valuable to the Federal cause if viewed only in its strategic, geographical and other external aspects. But it bore one other fruit of immeasurably greater importance even than these things. It discovered to the government at Washington the existence and the capacity of a commander capable of measuring swords with Robert E. Lee. It taught the authorities at Washington at last the lesson which ought to have been learned by them many moons earlier, namely that in Grant the nation had at its service a man great enough to understand the war problem and to solve it--a man capable of clearly seeing and perfectly understanding that the Confederate strength lay in the fighting force of the Southern armies, rather than in the possession of strategic positions--a man fit to use the enormously superior resources of the North in men, money and material, in such fashion as to break the resisting power of the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant was eminently a man of common sense rather than of imagination. The picturesque and the romantic appealed to him scarcely at all. War was to him a problem in physics. It was his habit of mind when any undertaking was set for him to do, carefully to weigh the means at his command and the means at the command of his enemy, and judiciously to employ whatever superiority of means he possessed for the accomplishment of the purposed end. There had been much strategy of another sort than this employed in the conduct of the war on the Federal side. There had been much of sentiment brought to bear ineffectually, and often with disastrous results. With the coming of Grant the turn of common sense had come, and Grant preëminently represented common sense, backed by daring, determination and tireless energy. After Vicksburg the days of the dominance of Halleck and his kind were numbered. The time was approaching when capacity was to take command in lieu of regularity; when sense was to replace shoulder straps; when the man under the uniform was to count for more than the uniform. The Galena clerk, Ulysses S. Grant, was a few months hence to succeed to the command of all the armies of the United States, replacing the pet of an antiquated system. Two thirds of a year were yet to elapse before this change in the administration of Federal military affairs should completely take place, but its coming was sure and with it the beginning of an end to a struggle which had already cost the country much of its best blood and untold millions of its treasure. To the nation the best result of the Vicksburg campaign was its discovery of Grant. CHAPTER XL THE STATE OF THINGS AFTER GETTYSBURG