From the preface: These studies of the relations which existed between statesmen and soldiers during the course of a prolonged war were delivered as the Lees-Knowles Lectures for 1925-26 at Trinity College, Cambridge. The idea from which these lectures originated had its germ in a conversation with Lord Kitchener in 1915. ~ My historical studies are therefore frankly and unashamedly objective. I had long been dissatisfied that the judgements of Lord Wolseley and of Colonel F.R. Henderson upon Lincoln’s conduct of the war, written by the former on incomplete information, and by the latter in a study of one pat only of the American Civil War, should stand as the British military criticism of a great statesmen” Includes: Jefferson Davis, J.E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, George McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, and the conduct of the war.