Laudator Temporis Acti

Bruce Catton, Glory Road (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952), pp. 30-31, with note on p. 350:

For this was an army that had to operate strictly on its own. From beginning to end, at one level or another, its command was either erratic or beset with slackness and incompetence. Something like this business of the pontoons was always happening, something was always going irretrievably wrong, owing less to any single shortcoming than to a general failure on the part of someone in shoulder straps. It is impossible to disagree with the historian who remarked that the army was cursed "by a line of brave and patriotic officers whom some good fairy ought to have knocked on the head."¹⁵ What the army finally was to do, if indeed it was to do anything, would at last depend almost entirely on the men in the ranks. Individual leaders who were worthy of them, these men did indeed have here and there, at varying levels of command from company to army corps. But leadership which, as a whole, came even close to being good enough for them—that, from the day the war began to the day it ended, these men never got.

15. William B. Weeden in War Government, Federal and State, 1861-1865, p. 95.