by Robert Knox Sneden
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch April 23 1864:
From Northern Virginia.
Orange C. H., April 23d.
–Observations from Clark’s Mountain disclose no change in the Yankee camps. It is reported that the enemy will begin to-day moving up their rear, preparatory to an advance. Nothing is going on in our front indicating an immediate advance. The roads are dry and hard. The weather beautiful.
Meanwhile people in Richmond could read that the new man in charge of those Yankees was considered a second-rate blunderer by some in the North and by a French critic.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch April 22, 1864:
everyone’s a critic (Gustave Paul Cluseret)
Gen. Grant.
–Among military men at the North Grant is not regarded as a genius. The new Fremont organ in New York, the New Nation, devotes a considerable space in every issue to a denunciation of the policy which has placed the whole military operations of the Federals in the control of a “second-rate General.” One General Cluseret, an old French army officer, now in the Federal service, writes a series of articles to this paper on Grant. He shows that Grant blundered for months over an unnecessary canal, opposite Vicksburg, wasting thousands of lives thereby, and abandoning the project eventually; that the victory at Chattanooga was due to the previous disposition of the Federal troops by General Rosecrans, and that General Buell really commanded at Shiloh. General Cluseret pronounces Rosecrans the only eminent military genius in the Federal army. Just now Rosecrans is on the retired list for his Chickamauga disaster.
You can see a view from Clark’s Mountain here.
