IT

is a noteworthy fact that the State

of Illinois furnished not only the most illustrious of Presidents since the first, and the greatest of our military leaders during the late war, but two Major-Generals of Volunteers besides, who were admitted, by military critics of authority, to be soldiers of great capacity; soldiers to whom even the graduates of West Point assigned high rank in point of genius. We refer here to John A. Logan and JOHN M. PALMER. Whatever dispute there was about others, there was little or no dispute, in intelligent military circles, about Logan and PALMER. As to General Butler, the most widely known of the generals who had not received the regular course of our military academy, it was agreed that he was very great in military administration; but many trained soldiers thought that in the field he was little better than a magnificent burlesque. General Banks, among the politicians who served in the army, also attained distinction, and undoubtedly deserved much praise in the earlier part of his military career; but he

failed to maintain his reputation, and at the close of the war he had passed to the rear of eminent men, and had carried his fame with him on a stretcher. Surgery greatly aided the case, but the scars were left. There were no others, of the volunteer generals, so celebrated as these two Massachusetts and two Illinois officers. Three of them have been Representatives in Congress nearly all the time since the war, where their records have gone to form part of our national history. The other belongs, for the present at least, more especially to the West.

JOHN MCCAULEY PALMER was born, September 13, 1817, in Scott county, Kentucky, it being about one year after Thomas Lincoln, with Nancy Hanks, his wife, and Abraham, their son, had emigrated from the State, and while they were toilfully at work trying to make a farm in Indiana,-no more conscious of the future than the child just born. Lincoln preceded PALMER to Illinois by some two years. PALMER, then a farmer-boy of fifteen years, came to the State of which he is now the chief