Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, once that stated, "War means fighting and fighting means killing." Not all civil war generals could muster so direct such an approach to war and violence. Many preferred to try any means of defeating an enemy except fighting. These were usually the same generals who could not overcome their troops' natural desire to remain where they were, so long as they were safe.

Historian T. Harry Williams called this phenomenon the "inertia of war," that moment when "the general's own army, begins to offer resistance....when the whole inertia of the war comes to rest on his will, and only the spark of his own purpose and spirit can throw it off... a commander has to have in his make-up a mental strength and moral  power that enables him to dominate whatever event or crisis  may emerge on the field of battle."  But were the war's inert generals fundamentally flawed leaders or was there another reason for their lapses into feebleness?

When labeling the attributes of a successful general, Marshall Maurice Saxe, France's great military mind of the early 18th Century, presented the usual list including bravery, intelligence etc. then he added one more, health. It is doubtful that the outcome of the Civil War would have been any different if all the generals had been healthy. But the fact is they were not, and perhaps much of their erratic and lethargic behavior can be ascribed to their frail state of health--and to opium, the panacea their doctors described at every turn.