s, and McClernand. There were of course
good soldiers who came from civil life. Cox himself is a conspicuous
instance, and there were Terry, John A. Logan, and other good division
commanders. On the Southern side may be instanced N.B. Forrest and
J.B. Gordon; but these men rarely attained to more than secondary
positions, the highest places falling, as if by gravitation, into the
hands of West Pointers. An influence there was in the little academy
on the Hudson which somehow brought to pass a superior warlike
efficiency. The training at West Point, supplemented as it usually was
by campaigning on the plains, although duty was done only by men in
squads, and the hardships and perils were scarcely greater than those
encountered by the ordinary pioneer and railroad-builder, somehow
evoked the field-marshal quality and made it easier to grapple
with the tremendous problems with which the army was so suddenly
confronted.

A certain pathos attaches to the story of some of those civilian
soldiers. In my youthful days, I had often seen N.P. Banks, who had
risen from the humblest beginning into much political importance. No
large distinction can be claimed for him in any direction, and for
elevation of character he was certainly not marked; but he was a man
of respectable ability and he climbed creditably from factory-boy to
mechanic and thence (through no noisome paths) to Congress, to the
post of Governor, and to the Speakership at Washington.

He had military ambition and with the beginning of the war went
at once into the army, unfortunately for him, as major-general
and commander of a department. Could he have gone in as captain or
colonel, his fortune would probably have been different. But, sent
to command in the Shenandoah Valley, it was his fate to meet at the
outset the most formidable of adversaries, Stonewall Jackson. He
was sorely hoodwinked and humiliated, but so were several of his
successors. At Cedar Mountain, understanding that his orders were
peremptory, he threw his corps upon double their numbers and fought
with all the bravery in the world though with defective tactics.
Another corps should have been at hand, but it failed to arrive. There
was a moment when Banks, weak though he was, was near to victory, but
he failed in the end in an impossible task and was made scapegoat for
the blunders of others. He was sent to supersede Butler in Louisiana
with a force quite inadequate for the duty expected. It was h