William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[255] to throw in division after division, to foredoomed destruction.

But while this may explain, it will not justify General Burnside's conduct. It would have been well for him had the failure of the first assaults, and the disclosures they made of the strength and position of the enemy, given him pause in their repetition. When General Warren at Mine Run, after viewing the enemy's line, which, like that at Fredericksburg, was manifestly impregnable, declined to throw away the lives that had been placed in his charge, preferring with a noble sense of honor and duty to sacrifice himself rather than his command, that instinct of right which is never absent in a generous people, appreciated the motive and applauded the act.

Had General Burnside followed the like prompting, he would have saved his name from association with a slaughter the most bloody and the most useless of the war.

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Iii. Abortive movements on the Rappahannock.

In tracing the development of military operations as they stand related to the army that was the agent of their execution, it is important to mark not only the army's condition of material strength and well-being, but those moral transformations with which, in so large a degree, its efficiency as a living organism is bound up.

Nothing is more difficult than to indicate, in precise terms, that complex of qualities, passions, prejudices, and illusions, that at any given time make up what is expressively called the morale of an army. Like the imponderable forces of physical philosophy, it is inappreciable by material weight and measure. Yet, if difficult of analysis, it does not fail to make itself felt as a palpable power; and the foremost master