The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1880-05-20
The imaqinati0n as a Political F actor

her children" LII, as a matter OF
fact, wisdom is justified of her chill
dren, her brood is not a large one.
Those who labor for the elevation of
their kind are few, and rarely merge
from obscurity. Those who give
the world its wisdom are neglected
while living, and remembered after
their death only by those who read
Old books. But endOw man with
genius to lead thousands to the
slaughter of thousands-to drench
the earth with blood, to fill the land
with widows and orphans, and the
air with the wailings of human dis
tress, and you have the worlds ideal
hero. He may be coarse and vulgar,
he may be ignorant and brutal, he
is sure to be intensely selfish and
tyrannical, it matters not, he is a
great soldier, and the whole world
falls down before him.
U. S. Grant is a remarkable illus
tration of this fact. Pluck and te
nacity, aided by circumstances,
made him the central figure in the
closing acts of a mighty drama COM
pared with which all other affairs on
this continent are but skirmishes.-
He came to the front at a time when
he had the mistakes of many prede-
cessors to profit by, every one of
whom were his intellectual superiors.
He came at time when experience
had developed line of great soldiers
to carry out his orders. Sedwick,
Custer, Meade, McPhearson, Han
cock, Thomas, Schofield, Sherman,
Stanley, Slocum, &C., came to the
front, triumphing where others fail
ed; and when Grant said fight they
fought. But in his entire career
from Belmont to Appamattox there
is not one single exhibition of genius.
His whole triumph lay in his supe-
rior numbers and boundless re-
sources, and his single characteris-
tic-pert5sacity. Napoleon frequent
" displayed more real genius in one
hour than Grant displayed in his
whole military career, but Grant
possessed what was almost original
with him-the courage, when beat
en-, to advance instead of retreating.
He fought with an utter reckless
ness of human life, upon the well
grounded assumption that back of
him were the masses to replace his
losses, while the losses which he in
ficted upon his blockaded antago-
nists could not be replaced. On this
principle he sacrificed $4,000 men in
moving his army from the Kappa
hammock to the seige of Richmond.
He inflicted heavy loss in those
tremendous battles of only 10000
or $4,000, because the Confederates
received every onslaught in positions
which Lee had selected and fortified.
The country justified this barbarous
slaughter of the Federal troops be-
cause in the end their arms triumph.
ed.
But let us reverse the order of
things. Let us put Grant where Lee
was, and let him play his tactics
against superior numbers and I'M
limited resources, and where would
he have been. He would have been
not only crushed but denounced as
an imbecile. Grants logged tenaci-
ty served good purpose, surround
ed as he was by able generals and
resources, but there was
no genius in it.
In fact the only genius ever de-
veloped by the "great soldier" is the
genius of dissiInulation. He is sue
'essful beyond all preredents in
an iaordinate vanity and
ambition behind the cloak
Of modest humanity. He came out