It is pleasant to see how much the present war has done towards effacing
the traditional jealousy between regular officers and volunteers. The
two classes have been so thoroughly intermingled, on staff-duties and in
the field,--so many regular officers now hold in the volunteer service a
rank higher than their permanent standing,--the whole previous military
experience of most regulars was so trifling, compared with that which
they and the volunteers have now shared in common,--and so many young
men have lately been appointed to commissions, in both branches, not
only without a West-Point education, but with almost none at all,--that
it really cannot be said that there is much feeling of conscious
separation left. For treating the two as antagonistic the time has
clearly gone by. For judiciously weighing their respective services in
the field the epoch has not come, since the reign of history begins only
when that of telegrams and special correspondents has ended. It is
better, therefore, to limit the comparison, as yet, to that minor
routine of military duty upon which the daily existence of an army
depends, and of which the great deeds of daring are merely exciting
episodes.
At the beginning of the war, and before the distinction was thus
partially effaced, the comparison involved very different elements. In
our general military inexperience, the majority were not disposed to
underrate the value of specific professional training. Education holds
in this country much of the prestige held by hereditary rank in Europe,
modified only by the condition that the possessor shall take no undue
airs upon himself. Even then the penalty consists only in a few
outbreaks of superficial jealousy, and the substantial respect for any
real acquirements remains the same. So there was a time when the
faintest aroma of West Point lent a charm to the most unattractive
candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in
intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters
at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the
frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to
confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he
succeeded, to the State-House be the glory.
Yet there was always another party of critics, not less intelligent, who
urged the value of general preparations for any duty, as compared with
special,--who held that it was always easier for a man of brains to
acquire technical skill than for a person of mere technicality to
superadd brains, and that the antecedents of a frontier lieutenant were,
on the whole, a poorer training for large responsibilities than those of
many a civilian, who had lived in the midst of men, though out of
uniform. Let us have a fair statement of this position, for it was very
sincere and had much temporary influence. The main thing, it was argued,
was the knowledge of human nature and the habit of dealing with mankind
in masses,--the very thing from which the younger regular officers at
least had been rigidly excluded. From a monastic life at West Point they
had usually been transferred to a yet more isolated condition, in some
obscure outpost,--or if otherwise, then they had seen no service at all,
and were mere clerks in shoulder-straps. But a lawyer who could
manoeuvre fifty witnesses as if they were one,--a teacher used to
governing young men by the hundred,--an orator trained to sway
thousands,--a master-mechanic,--a railway-superintendent,--a
factory-agent,--a broker who could harness Wall Street and drive it,--a
financier who could rule a sovereign State with a rod of (railway)
iron,--such men as these, it was plausibly reasoned, could give an
average army-officer all the advantage of his special training, at the
start, and yet beat him at his own trade in a year.
These theories were naturally strengthened, moreover, by occasional
instances of conspicuous failure, when volunteer troops were intrusted
to regular officers. These disappointments could usually be traced to
very plain causes. The men selected were sometimes men whose West-Point
career would hardly bear minute investigation,--or who had in civil
pursuits forgotten all they had learned at the Academy, except
self-esteem,--or who had been confined to the duties of some special
department, as quartermasters or paymasters, and were really fitted for
nothing else,--or who had served their country by resigning their
commissions, if not by holding them,--or who had contrived, first or
last, to lose hopelessly their tempers or their digestions, or their
faith, hope, and charity. Beyond all this lay the trouble, that the best
regular officer from the very fact of his superior training was puzzled
to know how much to demand of volunteer troops, or what standard to
enforce upon them. It was a problem in the Differential Calculus, with
the Army Regulations for a constant, and a raw volunteer regiment for a
variable, and not a formula in Davies which suited the purpose.
Unfortunately, these perplexities were quite as apt to end in relaxation
as in rigor, so that the regiments thus commanded sometimes slid into a
looseness of which a resolute volunteer officer would have been ashamed.
These were among the earlier results. Against them was to be set the
fact, that, on the whole, no regiments in the field made progress so
rapid, or held their own so well, as those placed under regular
officers. And now that three years have abolished many surmises, and
turned many others into established facts, it must be owned that the
total value of the professional training has proved far greater, and
that of the general preparation far less, than many intelligent
observers predicted. The relation between officer and soldier is
something so different in kind from anything which civil life has to
offer, that it has proved almost impossible to transfer methods or
maxims from the one to the other. If a regiment is merely a caucus, and
the colonel the chairman,--or merely a fire-company, and the colonel the
foreman,--or merely a prayer-meeting, and the colonel the moderator,--or
merely a bar-room, and the colonel the landlord,--then the failure of
the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. War is not the highest of
human pursuits, certainly; but an army comes very near to being the
completest of human organizations, and he alone succeeds in it who
readily accepts its inevitable laws, and applies them. An army is an
aristocracy, on a three-years' lease, supposing that the period of
enlistment. No mortal skill can make military power effective on
democratic principles. A democratic people can perhaps carry on a war
longer and better than any other; because no other can so well
comprehend the object, raise the means, or bear the sacrifices. But
these sacrifices include the surrender, for the time being, of the
essential principle of the government. Personal independence in the
soldier, like personal liberty in the civilian, must be waived for the
preservation of the nation. With shipwreck staring men in the face, the
choice lies between despotism and anarchy, trusting to the common sense
of those concerned, when the danger is over, to revert to the old
safeguards. It is precisely because democracy is an advanced stage in
human society, that war, which belongs to a less advanced stage, is
peculiarly inconsistent with its habits. Thus the undemocratic
character, so often lamented in West Point and Annapolis, is in reality
their strong point. Granted that they are no more appropriate to our
stage of society than are revolvers and bowie-knives, that is precisely
what makes them all serviceable in time of war. War being exceptional,
the institutions which train its officers must be exceptional likewise.
The first essential for military authority lies in the power of
command,--a power which it is useless to analyze, for it is felt
instinctively, and it is seen in its results. It is hardly too much to
say, that, in military service, if one has this power, all else becomes
secondary; and it is perfectly safe to say that without it all other
gifts are useless. Now for the exercise of power there is no preparation
like power, and nowhere is this preparation to be found, in this
community, except in regular army-training. Nothing but great personal
qualities can give a man by nature what is easily acquired by young men
of very average ability who are systematically trained to command.
The criticism habitually made upon our army by foreign observers at the
beginning of the war continues still to be made, though in a rather less
degree,--that the soldiers are relatively superior to the officers, so
that the officers lead, perhaps, but do not command them. The reason is
plain. Three years are not long enough to overcome the settled habits of
twenty years. The weak point of our volunteer service invariably lies
here, that the soldier, in nine cases out of ten, utterly detests being
commanded, while the officer, in his turn, equally shrinks from
commanding. War, to both, is an episode in life, not a profession, and
therefore military subordination, which needs for its efficiency to be
fixed and absolute, is, by common consent, reduced to a minimum. The
white American soldier, being, doubtless, the most intelligent in the
world, is more ready than any other to comply with a reasonable order,
but he does it because it is reasonable, not because it is an order.
With advancing experience his compliance increases, but it is still
because he better and better comprehends the reason. Give him an order
that looks utterly unreasonable,--and this is sometimes necessary,--or
give him one which looks trifling, under which head all sanitary
precautions are yet too apt to rank, and you may, perhaps, find that you
still have a free and independent citizen to deal with, not a soldier.
_Implicit_ obedience must be admitted still to be a rare quality in our
army; nor can we wonder at it. In many cases there is really no more
difference between officers and men, in education or in breeding, than
if the one class were chosen by lot from the other; all are from the
same neighborhood, all will return to the same civil pursuits side by
side; every officer knows that in a little while each soldier will again
become his client or his customer, his constituent or his rival. Shall
he risk offending him for life in order to carry out some hobby of
stricter discipline? If this difficulty exist in the case of
commissioned officers, it is still more the case with the
non-commissioned, those essential intermediate links in the chain of
authority. Hence the discipline of our soldiers has been generally that
of a town-meeting or of an engine-company, rather than that of an army;
and it shows the extraordinary quality of the individual men, that so
much has been accomplished with such a formidable defect in the
organization. Even granting that there has been a great and constant
improvement, the evil is still vast enough. And every young man trained
at West Point enters the service with at least this advantage, that he
has been brought up to command, and has not that task to learn.
He has this further advantage, that he is brought up with some respect
for the army-organization as it is, with its existing rules, methods,
and proprieties, and is not, like the newly commissioned civilian,
disposed in his secret soul to set aside all its proprieties as mere
"pipe-clay," its methods as "old-fogyism," and its rules as "red-tape."
How many good volunteer officers will admit, if they speak candidly,
that on entering the service they half believed the "Army Regulations"
to be a mass of old-time rubbish, which they would gladly reëdit, under
contract, with immense improvements, in a month or two,--and that they
finally left the service with the conviction that the same book was a
mine of wisdom, as yet but half explored! Certainly, when one thinks
for what a handful of an army our present military system was devised,
and with what an admirable elasticity it has borne this sudden and
stupendous expansion, it must be admitted to have most admirably stood
the test. Of course, there has been much amendment and alteration
needed, nor is the work done yet; but it has mainly touched the details,
not the general principles. The system is wonderfully complete for its
own ends, and the more one studies it the less one sneers. Many a form
which at first seems to the volunteer officer merely cumbrous and
trivial he learns to prize at last as almost essential to good
discipline; he seldom attempts a short cut without finding it the
longest way, and rarely enters on that heroic measure of cutting
red-tape without finding at last that he has entangled his own fingers
in the process.
More thorough training tells in another way. It is hard to appreciate,
without the actual experience, how much of military life is a matter of
mere detail. The maiden at home fancies her lover charging at the head
of his company, when in reality he is at that precise moment endeavoring
to convince his company-cooks that salt-junk needs five hours' boiling,
or is anxiously deciding which pair of worn-out trousers shall be
ejected from a drummer-boy's knapsack. Courage is, no doubt, a good
quality in a soldier, and luckily not often wanting; but, in the long
run, courage depends largely on the haversack. Men are naturally brave,
and when the crisis comes, almost all men will fight well, if well
commanded. As Sir Philip Sidney said, an army of stags led by a lion is
more formidable than an army of lions led by a stag. Courage is cheap;
the main duty of an officer is to take good care of his men, so that
every one of them shall be ready, at a moment's notice, for any
reasonable demand. A soldier's life usually implies weeks and months of
waiting, and then one glorious hour; and if the interval of leisure has
been wasted, there is nothing but a wasted heroism at the end, and
perhaps not even that. The penalty for misused weeks, the reward for
laborious months, may be determined within ten minutes. Without
discipline an army is a mob, and the larger the worse; without rations
the men are empty uniforms; without ammunition they might as well have
no guns; without shoes they might almost as well have no legs. And it is
in the practical appreciation of all these matters that the superiority
of the regular officer is apt to be shown.
Almost any honest volunteer officer will admit, that, although the
tactics were easily learned, yet, in dealing with all other practical
details of army-life, he was obliged to gain his knowledge through many
blunders. There were a thousand points on which the light of Nature,
even aided by "Army Regulations," did not sufficiently instruct him; and
his best hints were probably obtained by frankly consulting regular
officers, even if inferior in rank. The advantage of a West-Point
training is precisely that of any other professional education. There is
nothing in it which any intelligent man cannot learn for himself in
later life; nevertheless, the intelligent man would have fared a good
deal better, had he learned it all in advance. Test it by shifting the
positions. No lawyer would trust his case to a West-Point graduate,
without evidence of thorough special preparation. Yet he himself enters
on a career equally new to him, where his clients may be counted by
thousands, and every case is capital. The army is a foreign country to
civilians; of course you can learn the language after your arrival, but
how you envy your companion, who, having spoken it from childhood, can
proceed at once to matters more important!
Yet the great advantage of the regular army does not, after all, consist
merely in any superiority of knowledge, or in the trained habit of
command. Granting that patience and labor can readily supply these to
the volunteer, the trouble remains, that even in labor and patience the
regular officer is apt to have the advantage, by reason of a stronger
stimulus. The difference is not merely in the start, but in the pace. No
man can be often thrown into the society of regular officers, especially
among the younger ones, without noticing a higher standard of
professional earnestness than that found among average volunteers; and
in this respect a West-Point training makes little or no difference. The
reason of the superiority is obvious. To the volunteer, the service is
still an episode; to the regular, a permanent career. No doubt, if a man
is thoroughly conscientious, or thoroughly ambitious, or thoroughly
enthusiastic, a temporary pursuit may prove as absorbing as if it were
taken up for life; but the majority of men, however well-meaning, are
not thorough at all. How often one hears the apology made by volunteer
officers, even those of high rank,--"Military life is not my profession;
I entered the army from patriotism, willing to serve my country
faithfully for three years, but of course not pretending to perfection
in every trivial detail of a pursuit which I shall soon quit forever."
But it is patriotism to think the details _not_ trivial. If one gives
one's self to one's country, let the gift be total and noble. These
details are worthy to absorb the whole daily thought, and they should
absorb it, until more thorough comprehension and more matured executive
power leave room for larger studies, still in the line of the adopted
occupation. If a man leaves his office or his study to be a soldier, let
him be a soldier in earnest. Let those three years bound the horizon of
his plans, and let him study his new duty as if earth offered no other
conceivable career. The scholar must forswear his pen, the lawyer his
books, the politician his arts. An officer of whatever rank, who does
not find occupation enough for every day, amid the quietest
winter-quarters, in the prescribed duties of his position and the
studies to which they should lead, is fitted only for civil pursuits,
and had better return to them.
Without this thoroughness, life in the army affords no solid
contentment. What is called military glory is a fitful and uncertain
thing. Time and the newspapers play strange tricks with reputations, and
of a hundred officers whose names appear with honor in this morning's
despatches ninety may never be mentioned again till it is time to write
their epitaphs. Who, for instance, can recite the names of the
successive cavalry-commanders who have ridden on their bold forays
through Virginia, since the war began? All must give place to the latest
Kautz or Sheridan, who has eclipsed without excelling them all. Yet each
is as brave and as faithful to-day, no doubt, as when he too glittered
for his hour before all men's gaze, and the obscurer duty may be the
more substantial honor. So when I lift my eyes to look on yonder level
ocean-floor, the fitful sunshine now glimmers white on one far-off sail,
now on another; and yet I know that all canvas looks snowy while those
casual rays are on it, and that the best vessel is that which, sunlit or
shaded, best accomplishes its destined course. The officer is almost as
powerless as the soldier to choose his opportunity or his place.
Military glory may depend on a thousand things,--the accident of local
position, the jealousy of a rival, the whim of a superior. But the merit
of having done one's whole duty to the men whose lives are in one's
keeping, and to the nation whose life is staked with theirs,--of having
held one's command in such a state, that, if at any given moment it was
not performing the most brilliant achievement, it might have been,--this
is the substantial triumph which every faithful officer has always
within reach.
Now will any one but a newspaper flatterer venture to say that this is
the habitual standard in our volunteer service? Take as a test the
manner in which official inspections are usually regarded by a
regimental commander. These occasions are to him what examinations by
the School Committee are to a public-school teacher. He may either
deprecate and dodge them, or he may manfully welcome them as the very
best means of improvement for all under his care. Which is the more
common view? What sight more pitiable than to behold an officer begging
off from inspection because he has just come in from picket, or is just
going out on picket, or has just removed camp, or was a day too late
with his last requisition for cartridges? No doubt it is a trying ordeal
to have some young regular-army lieutenant ride up to your tent at an
hour's notice, and leisurely devote a day to probing every weak spot in
your command,--to stand by while he smells at every camp-kettle, detects
every delinquent gun-sling, ferrets out old shoes from behind the
mess-bunks, spies out every tent-pole not labelled with the sergeant's
name, asks to see the cash-balance of each company-fund, and perplexes
your best captain on forming from two ranks into one by the left flank.
Yet it is just such unpleasant processes as these which are the
salvation of an army; these petty mortifications are the fulcrum by
which you can lift your whole regiment to a first-class rank, if you
have only the sense to use them. So long as no inspecting officer needs
twice to remind you of the same thing, you have no need to blush. But
though you be the bravest of the brave, though you know a thousand
things of which he is utterly ignorant, yet so long as he can tell you
one thing which you ought to know, he is master of the situation. He may
be the most conceited little popinjay who ever strutted in uniform; no
matter; it is more for your interest to learn than for his to teach. Let
our volunteer officers, as a body, once resolve to act on this
principle, and we shall have such an army as the world never saw. But
nothing costs the nation a price so fearful, in money or in men, as the
false pride which shrinks from these necessary surgical operations, or
regards the surgeon as a foe.
It is not being an officer to wear uniform for three years, to draw
one's pay periodically, and to acquit one's self without shame during a
few hours or days of actual battle. History will never record what fine
regiments have been wasted and ruined, since this war began, by the
negligence in camp of commanders who were brave as Bayard in the field.
Unless a man is willing to concentrate his whole soul upon learning and
performing the humblest as well as the most brilliant functions of his
new profession, a true officer he will never become. More time will not
help him; for time seldom does much for one who enters, especially in
middle life, on an employment for which he is essentially unfitted. It
is amusing to see the weight attached to the name of veteran, in
military matters, by persons who in civil life are very ready to
exchange a veteran doctor or minister for his younger rival. Military
seniority, though the only practicable rule of precedence, is liable to
many notorious inconveniences. It is especially without meaning in the
volunteer service, where the Governor of Maine may happen to date a set
of commissions on the first day of January, and His Excellency of
Minnesota may doom his contemporary regiment to life-long subordination
by accidentally postponing theirs to the second day. But it has
sufficient drawbacks even where all the appointments pass through one
channel. The dignity it gives is a merely chronological distinction,--an
oldest-inhabitant renown,--much like the university-degree of A. M.,
which simply implies that a man has got decently through college, and
then survived three years. But if a man was originally placed in a
position beyond his deserts, the mere lapse of time may have only made
him the more dangerous charlatan. If he showed no sign of military
aptitude in six months, a probation of three years may have been more
costly, but not more conclusive. Add to this the fact that each
successive year of the war has seen all officers more carefully
selected, if only because there has been more choice of material; so
that there is sometimes a temptation in actual service, were it
practicable, to become Scriptural in our treatment, and put the last
first and the first last. In those unfortunate early days, when it
seemed to most of our Governors to make little difference whom they
commissioned, since all were alike untried, and of two evils it was
natural to choose that which would produce the more agreeable
consequences at the next election-time,--in those days of darkness many
very poor officers saw the light. Many of these have since been happily
discharged or judiciously shelved. The trouble is, that those who remain
are among the senior officers in our volunteer army, in their respective
grades. They command posts, brigades, divisions. They preside at
court-martials. Beneath the shadow of their notorious incompetency all
minor evils may lurk undetected. To crown all, they are, in many cases,
sincere and well-meaning men, utterly obtuse as to their own
deficiencies, and manifesting (to employ a witticism coeval with
themselves) all the Christian virtues except that of resignation.
The present writer has beheld the spectacle of an officer of high rank,
previously eminent in civil life, who could only vindicate himself
before a court-martial from the ruinous charge of false muster by
summoning a staff-officer to prove that it was his custom to sign all
military papers without looking at them. He has seen a lieutenant tried
for neglect of duty in allowing a soldier under his command, at an
important picket-post, to be found by the field-officer of the day with
two inches of sand in the bottom of his gun,--and pleading, in
mitigation of sentence, that it had never been the practice in his
regiment to make any inspection of men detailed for such duty. That such
instances of negligence should be tolerated for six months in any
regiment of regulars is a thing almost inconceivable, and yet in these
cases the regiments and the officers had been nearly three years in
service.
It is to be remembered that even the command of a regiment of a thousand
men is a first-class administrative position, and that there is no
employer of men in civil life who assumes the responsibility of those
under his command so absolutely and thoroughly. The life, the health,
the efficiency, the finances, the families of his soldiers, are staked
not so much on the courage of a regimental commander as upon his
decision, his foresight, and his business-habits. As Richter's worldly
old statesman tells his son, "War trains a man to business." If he takes
his training slowly, he must grow perfect through suffering,--commonly
the suffering of other people. The varied and elaborate returns, for
instance, now required of officers,--daily, monthly, quarterly,
annually,--are not one too many as regards the interests of Government
and of the soldiers, but are enough to daunt any but an accurate and
methodical man. A single error in an ordnance requisition may send a
body of troops into action with only twenty rounds of ammunition to a
man. One mistake in a property-voucher may involve an officer in
stoppages exceeding his yearly pay. One wrong spelling in a muster-roll
may beggar a soldier's children ten years after the father has been
killed in battle. Under such circumstances no standard of accuracy can
be too high. And yet even the degree of regularity that now exists is
due more to the constant pressure from head-quarters than to any
individual zeal. For a large part of this pressure the influence of the
regular army is responsible,--those officers usually occupying the more
important staff-positions, and having in some departments of service,
especially in the ordnance, moulded and remoulded the whole machinery
until it has become almost a model. It would be difficult to name
anything in civil life which is in its way so perfect as the present
system of business and of papers in this department. Every ordnance
blank now contains a schedule of instructions for its own use, so simple
and so minute that it seems as if, henceforward, the most negligent
volunteer officer could never make another error. And yet in the very
last set of returns which the writer had occasion to revise,--returns
made by a very meritorious captain,--there were eight different papers,
and a mistake in every one.
The glaring defeat of most of our volunteer regiments, from the
beginning to this day, has lain in slovenliness and remissness as to
every department of military duty, except the actual fighting and dying.
When it comes to that ultimate test, our men usually endure it so
magnificently that one is tempted to overlook all deficiencies on
intermediate points. But they must not be overlooked, because they
create a fearful discount on the usefulness of our troops, when tried by
the standard of regular armies. I do not now refer to the niceties of
dress-parade or the courtesies of salutation: it has long since been
tacitly admitted that a white American soldier will not present arms to
any number of rows of buttons, if he can by any ingenuity evade it; and
to shoulder arms on passing an officer is something to which only
Ethiopia or the regular army can attain. Grant, if you please, (though I
do not grant,) that these are merely points of foolish punctilio. But
there are many things which are more than punctilio, though they may be
less than fighting. The efficiency of a body of troops depends, after
all, not so much on its bravery as on the condition of its sick-list. A
regiment which does picket-duty faithfully will often avoid the need of
duties more terrible. Yet I have ridden by night along a chain of ten
sentinels, every one of whom should have taken my life rather than
permit me to give the countersign without dismounting, and have been
required to dismount by only four, while two did not ask me for the
countersign at all, and two others were asleep. I have ridden through a
regimental camp whose utterly filthy condition seemed enough to send
malaria through a whole military department, and have been asked by the
colonel, almost with tears in his eyes, to explain to him why his men
were dying at the rate of one a day. The latter was a regiment nearly a
year old, and the former one of almost two years' service, and just from
the old Army of the Potomac.
The fault was, of course, in the officers. The officer makes the
command, as surely as, in educational matters, the teacher makes the
school. There is not a regiment in the army so good that it could not be
utterly spoiled in three months by a poor commander, nor so poor that it
could not be altogether transformed in six by a good one. The difference
in material is nothing,--white or black, German or Irish; so potent is
military machinery that an officer who knows his business can make good
soldiers out of almost anything, give him but a fair chance. The
difference between the present Army of the Potomac and any previous
one,--the reason why we do not daily hear, as in the early campaigns, of
irresistible surprises, overwhelming numbers, and masked batteries,--the
reason why the present movements are a tide and not a wave,--is not that
the men are veterans, but that the officers are. There is an immense
amount of perfectly raw material in General Grant's force, besides the
colored regiments, which in that army are all raw, but in which the
Copperhead critics have such faith they would gladly select them for
dangers fit for Napoleon's Old Guard. But the newest recruit soon grows
steady with a steady corporal at his elbow, a well-trained sergeant
behind him, and a captain or a colonel whose voice means something to
give commands.
This reference to the colored troops suggests the false impression,
still held by many, that special opposition to this important military
organization has been made by regular officers. There is no justice in
this. While it is very probable that regular officers, as a class, may
have had stronger prejudices on this point than others have held, yet it
is to be remembered that the chief obstacles have not come from them,
nor from military men of any kind, but from civilians at home. Nothing
has been more remarkable than the facility with which the expected
aversion of the army everywhere vanished before the admirable behavior
of the colored troops, and the substantial value of the reinforcements
they brought. When it comes to the simple question whether a soldier
shall go on duty every night or every other night, he is not critical as
to beauty of complexion in the soldier who relieves him.
Some regular officers may have been virulently opposed to the employment
of negroes as soldiers, though the few instances which I have known have
been far more than compensated by repeated acts of the most substantial
kindness from many others. But I never have met one who did not express
contempt for the fraud thus far practised by Government on a portion of
these troops, by refusing to pay them the wages which the Secretary of
War had guarantied. This is a wrong which, but for good discipline,
would have long since converted our older colored regiments into a mob
of mutineers, and which, while dishonestly saving the Government a few
thousand dollars, has virtually sacrificed hundreds of thousands in its
discouraging effect upon enlistments, at a time when the fate of the
nation may depend upon a few regiments more or less. It is in vain for
national conventions to make capital by denouncing massacres like that
of Fort Pillow, and yet ignore this more deliberate injustice for which
some of their own members are in part responsible. The colored soldiers
will take their own risk of capture and maltreatment very readily,
(since they must take it on themselves at any rate,) if the Government
will let its justice begin at home, and pay them their honest earnings.
It is of little consequence to a dying man whether any one else is to
die by retaliation, but it is of momentous consequence whether his wife
and family are to be cheated of half his scanty earnings by the nation
for which he dies. The Rebels may be induced to concede the negro the
rights of war, when we grant him the ordinary rights of peace, namely,
to be paid the price agreed upon. Jefferson Davis and the London
"Times"--one-half whose stock-in-trade is "the inveterate meanness of
the Yankee"--will hardly be converted to sound morals by the rebukes of
an administration which allows its Secretary of War to promise a black
soldier thirteen dollars a month, pay him seven, and shoot him if he
grumbles. From this crowning injustice the regular army, and, indeed,
the whole army, is clear; to civilians alone belongs this carnival of
fraud.
If, in some instances, terrible injustice has been done to the black
soldiers in their military treatment also, it has not been only, or
chiefly, under regular officers. Against the cruel fatigue duty imposed
upon them last summer, in the Department of the South, for instance,
must be set the more disastrous mismanagements of the Department of the
Gulf,--the only place from which we now hear the old stories of disease
and desertion,--all dating back to the astonishing blunder of organizing
the colored regiments of half-size at the outset, with a full complement
of officers. This measure, however agreeable it might have been to the
horde of aspirants for commissions, was in itself calculated to destroy
all self-respect in the soldiers, being based on the utterly baseless
assumption that they required twice as many officers as whites, and was
foredoomed to failure, because no _esprit de corps_ can be created in a
regiment which is from the first insignificant in respect to size. It is
scarcely conceivable that any regular officer should have honestly
fallen into such an error as this; and it is very certain that the
wisest suggestions and the most efficient action have proceeded, since
the beginning, from them. It will be sufficient to mention the names of
Major-General Hunter, Brigadier-General Phelps, and Adjutant-General
Thomas; and one there is whose crowning merits deserve a tribute
distinct even from these.
When some future Bancroft or Motley writes with philosophic brain and
poet's hand the story of the Great Civil War, he will find the
transition to a new era in our nation's history to have been fitly
marked by one festal day,--that of the announcement of the President's
Proclamation, upon Port-Royal Island, on the first of January, 1863.
That New-Year's time was our second contribution to the great series of
historic days, beads upon the rosary of the human race, permanent
festivals of freedom. Its celebration was one beside whose simple
pageant the superb festivals of other lands might seem but glittering
counterfeits. Beneath a majestic grove of the great live-oaks which
glorify the South-Carolina soil a liberated people met to celebrate
their own peaceful emancipation. They came thronging, by land and water,
from plantations which their own self-imposed and exemplary industry was
beginning already to redeem. The military escort which surrounded them
had been organized out of their own numbers, and had furnished to the
nation the first proof of the capacity of their race to bear arms. The
key-note of the meeting was given by spontaneous voices, whose
unexpected anthem took the day from the management of well-meaning
patrons, and swept all away into the great currents of simple feeling.
It was a scene never to be forgotten: the moss-hung trees, with their
hundred-feet diameter of shade; the eager faces of women and children in
the foreground; the many-colored headdresses; the upraised hands; the
neat uniforms of the soldiers; the outer row of mounted officers and
ladies; and beyond all the blue river, with its swift, free tide. And at
the centre of all this great and joyous circle stood modestly the man on
whose personal integrity and energy, more than on any President or
Cabinet, the hopes of all that multitude appeared to rest,--who
commanded then among his subjects, and still commands, an allegiance
more absolute than any European potentate can claim,--whose name will be
forever illustrious as having first made a practical reality out of that
Proclamation which then was to the President only an autograph, and to
the Cabinet only a dream,--who, when the whole fate of the slaves and of
the Government hung trembling in the balance, decided it forever by
throwing into the scale the weight of one resolute man,--who personally
mustered in the first black regiment, and personally governed the
first community where emancipation was a success,--who taught the
relieved nation, in fine, that there was strength and safety
in those dusky millions who till then had been an incubus and a
terror,--Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, Military Governor of South
Carolina. The single career of this one man more than atones for all the
traitors whom West Point ever nurtured, and awards the highest place on
the roll of our practical statesmanship to the regular army.