The National Government was more conservative than the Confederacy in this respect.

Our service was always full of colonels doing duty as brigadiers and brigadiers doing duty as major-generals, whilst the Southern army usually had a brigadier for every brigade and a major-general for every division, with lieutenant-generals and generals for the highest commands.

If some rigid method had been adopted for mustering out all officers whom the government, after a fair trial, was unwilling to trust with the command appropriate to their grade, there would have been little to complain of; but an evil which grew very great was that men in high rank were kept upon the roster after it was proven that they were incompetent, and when no army commander would willingly receive them as his subordinates.

Nominal commands at the rear or of a merely administrative kind were multiplied, and still many passed no small part of the war "waiting orders." As the total number of general officers was limited by law, it followed, of course, that promotion had to be withheld from many who had won it by service in the field.
This evil, however, was not peculiar to the class of appointments from civil life.

The faults in the first appointments were such as were almost necessarily connected with the sudden creation of a vast army.