"It should run its course by tomorrow," Grant said quietly, trying to force a smile.

Grant looked down at the reams of paper piled up on the table between them, accounts from nearly every railroad in the North reporting on available rolling stock, supplies, particularly armaments waiting at factories for pickup, locations of nearly every garrison, training depot, and recruiting station from Kansas City to Bangor.

They'd gone over it for hours, and the sheer waste was appalling. Well over a hundred thousand troops were scattered in remote posts and garrisons up north, or wasted on meaningless fronts. Many of these would not be ready for combat, having lived a soft life for too long, but they could still serve a better function than the one they now occupied, and they'd learn combat soon enough.

Elihu had pointed out to him how damn near every governor would howl when their pet units were pulled into federal service, men occupying forts in Boston Harbor, watching supplies in Cleveland, guarding river crossings in Iowa. The men who had these assignments usually had some friends in politics who had arranged a safe berth for them to sit out the war in comfort.

When Parker awoke, he'd pick up the writing of those letters that would set governors howling throughout the North.

Lincoln had tasked him to end the war and now, after two futile years of watching the stupidity, waste, and outright corruption, he would change anything that kept the Union from winning the war.

For the first couple of days after receiving notice from Lincoln, he had been overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. For two years the republic had waged war to heal itself, to re-create a single nation, but had done so at cross-purposes with itself, and often to its own detriment.

McClellan had been given the best chance to do so the previous year, marshaling close to two hundred thousand men in Virginia and Washington, then had wasted his supreme effort, with only a fraction of those men ever effectively engaged before Richmond.

The president had not helped, hobbling McClellan with orders to keep an entire army stationed near Washington. Yet it had gone far beyond that Officers had plotted against each other, jockeying for power. Congress had played its usual games of maneuvering and deal-making, even while men died in the swamps below Richmond. Never had there been a single unifying purpose, a single will shaping the republic to this war. A war that had to be fought with brutal, direct efficiency.

He had sensed from the very beginning that this war would be profoundly different from any other in history. After the bloody battle at Shiloh he had often talked about it with Sherman, late at night… that Sherman who had been called mad when he declared that in the West alone a quarter of a million men would be needed. A poet named Whitman, whom Julia would often read aloud and whom he hoped someday to meet, had sung of it, of a sprawling, muscular, urban nation of factories, and riches undreamed of. In some ways, like the poet's, his own vision was of a republic stirring, rising, waging a war not of glory, for he loathed that concept, but doing it grimly and efficiently and relentlessly until the job was done.

Here was the new strength, the new kind of war of men and machines to be forged and then used. He had seen it clearly the night Porter ran his fleet down below Vicksburg. Dozens of ships, sparks snapping from boilers, heavy guns firing, shot bouncing off armor, the sky afire, passing unharmed below the Confederate fortifications powerless to stop them. This was the final extension of power created in the smoke-filled factories of Albany, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, directed by men who but a year before were civilians, drawn from factories, fields, counting-houses, and forests to see it through.

He sat back, rubbing his forehead, looking down at the reports, and then shifted his gaze back, out the window, puffing meditatively on his cigar, a shower of ashes cascading down the front of his jacket

The troops stationed in major cities, however, would have to wait. The dispatches picked up early in the afternoon as they stopped for wood and water at Dayton were grim. All telegraph lines out of New York City had been cut, but indications were that the entire city was in anarchy. A New Jersey newspaper had claimed that the entire lower part of Manhattan was engulfed in flames, and ferryboats, packed with panic-stricken civilians, were docking in Jersey City reporting that insurgent rioters had taken the city.

Riots were reported in Philadelphia and Cincinnati as well, and troops in every other city across the North were on alert. The troops deployed to suppress or prevent rioting would have to be held in place for now, and that thought filled him with frustration.

The train slowed as it approached a sharp curve, and dropped down into a narrow valley to rattle across a trestle bridge. There was a glimpse, for a couple of seconds, of half a dozen tents, troops gathered in formation as if waiting for review, the men saluting as the train raced over the bridge.

Here was yet more waste, but until the movement of troops and equipment from Cairo to Harrisburg was completed, every bridge on this vital line had to be guarded, especially here in Ohio and Indiana, where rumors abounded of Copperhead conspiracies and even of Confederate raiders coming up from Kentucky.

This was the core of the problem. Where could he pull troops out, and yet at the same time maintain some level of safety? The motley-looking garrison on the bridge could do precious little if a real force of raiders showed up, but they were still a deterrent against the lone bridge burner or a drunken mob. It was the problem that had bedeviled the Union cause since the first days of the war, exasperated by panicky governors or, worse, selfish governors concerned only with their own state even if it hurt the Union. The thirty men on that bridge, multiplied a thousand times, could be yet another corps facing Lee.

His frustration was compounded by the entire system of mobilization, of state governors responsible for recruiting troops and only then transferring them over to the federal government The regiments recruited for three years were obviously destined for the front but for each of them created, there would usually be a three-month regiment that never left their state capital, and nine-month regiments that barely had time to learn their jobs before being demobilized.

Everyone knew the three-month regiments were a farce, a dodge for those who had political connections to avoid service yet wanted to be able to thump their chests and claim they had served. The hundreds of thousands of men who so briefly wore the blue uniform were worse than useless-in fact a drain on the entire system, taking uniforms, rifles; rations, and pay, while lounging about in garrisons as far north as the Canadian border.

He smiled grimly at the thought of the reaction that would come when those men were indeed called upon to serve.

Though he had never put much stock in the idea when it was first proposed, he found that now, in this crisis, colored troops might very well have a role to play, and he looked back at the pile of papers spilling off the desk, remembering the report stating that enough colored men for an entire division would soon be mobilized out of the northeast and Ohio. He looked back over at Parker, still asleep. Once he was awake, a message would have to be sent to the training center in Philadelphia. A division was a division and to hell with its color, as long as it would fight.

And thus he thought and plotted, a vision of the vast change that an industrial age was creating, a new concept of war, wherein the application of mass upon a single point would transcend the old vision of the past, of lone armies led by an inspired genius fighting but for an afternoon on sunlit fields to decide the fate of nations. He knew that many would claim that this was unfair, but he had nothing but contempt for those who thought thus and had never seen a battlefield the day after the guns fell silent. The job of war was to achieve victory, and in so doing end the slaughter as quickly as possible. How it was achieved, still within the parameters of some basic humanity, was secondary to the final act, the creation of that victory no matter what the cost or how long it took.