“This is now the most important command in the United States, involving immense labor, unceasing watchfulness and anxiety . . . I feel a confidence in General Grant’s ability to master the whole and turn again as heretofore the tide of defeat and disaster.”107 The general public was amazed by Rosecrans’s swift fall from grace. “Rosecrans is superseded by Grant!” the diarist George Templeton Strong exclaimed in New York. “The change astonishes everyone—its alleged reasons are still more startling. Opium-eating, fits of religious melancholy, and gross personal misconduct at Chickamauga are
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