it turns out that philip sheridan, as i discovered in working on this book, had not only never gone to testify before the legislature there, the texas legislature -- which had always struck me as suspicious, which is what i looked -- they had never considered such a bill. but that explanation that appeared in this memoir by a buffalo hunter, became the explanation that historians and journalists used for the next century, really, to explain what had happened to all these animals in the west. what actually happened, of course, we just let the market work. the federal government had never passed a law to inhibit any kind of wildlife hunting in the united states, and we did not do so until the 1900s. sort of like the south, deciding after the civil war, that the civil war was not caused by slavery was caused, it was a lost cause to preserve state' rights, that made everybody feel better about the civil war. blaming the government made everybody feel better for what we actually had done. individually. through selfish means to all these animals in the 19 century. -- 19th century. so, what w

union general philip sheridan once said that military intelligence was the great essential of success. so i thought, we have to look into this. but i also knew what ed was talking about because until he was researching his book in the 1950s, the records on the army secret service of the union army were scattered across record groups in the national archives and library of congress, other repositories all over. it was very hard to get at. in fact that is why it took 50 years to unpack all of it because he was all over the place looking in all the places. it was seemly -- seemingly an insurmountable challenge but he left out grant. he only got up to 1864 so i thought, that is my spot. once he got done, adding to this difficulty of all of this, was that only a handful of people involved in intelligence work and what they called secret service back then penned memoirs or any kind of reminiscence of what they did. so what happened is as a result the people who wrote these books played an outsized role to change the perception of what the civil war intelligence was like. the works were most

it was only once grant insisted on the appointment of philip sheridan as a deal commander and later, after david hunter generously stepped down, that grant finally have the command he wanted, and then, having been given instructions, he had to say the people in washington were interfering with him putting sheridan in charge of that army. so both men are haunted by what is going on in the shenandoah valley. is washington sufficiently protected? they faced a lot of common problems. so, in all of this, i want to suggest first of all -- and i know this is heresy to some of you and that's ok -- that's what i'm here for. abraham lincoln could be unsupportive and you just don't have to ask mary todd lincoln for evidence of that. [laughter] we all know george mcclellan said unflattering things about abraham lincoln. lincoln said unflattering things about george mcclellan, which we today celebrate as examples of presidential wit. about how the army of the potomac, for example, was no more than george mcclellan's bodyguard. generally speaking, but -- if you are trashing your subordinates and f