John Sharp Williams to Woodrow Wilson

Here is a letter from Dabney M. Scales, of Memphis, Tennessee, who was a gallant soldier in the Confederate Army and is a fine fellow, and here are some Resolutions passed by the Confederate Veterans of the City of Memphis at a recent meeting in that City, and also a carbon copy of my reply to Mr. Scales.
I hope that no consideration of mere politics will lead to making Theodore Roosevelt a brigadier general or anything higher than a lieutenant colonel. He has had very little military training, and, at the very best, is just about competent enough to assume the rank which he held during the Spanish American War. I say that out of no personal feeling towards the ex-President; on the contrary, we were always agreeable, courteous and kind, one to the other. I have a very high regard for him in many ways and admiration for him in some ways; but his obsession that he is a military genius is almost as great as that of Thomas H. Benton, who had the same obsession and whom he ridiculed because of it. It is almost as bad as to appoint men to military command because you are afraid that people will think you are actuated by mere political motives if you do not appoint them, as it is to appoint inefficient men because you are really actuated by political motives.
Of course, I mark this letter “Confidential”, and your clerk can send back to me the letter from Dabney Scales, although the Resolutions, I imagine, you would like to keep.
I am, with every expression of regard,