A political general was the insulting term for those high-ranking officers who never had any formal military training, never went to West Point or fought in the Mexican War. General Burnside, the career military man responsible for the most incompetent, wasteful battle of the war, was considered a real general. And Meagher’s appointment, it was said by many, was Lincoln’s sop to the Irish—the most glaring example of a political general. But after he’d held the line of a panicky retreat by other regiments at Bull Run, after he’d saved a division outside Richmond, after he took the Sunken Road
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