onstitutional commander-in-chief by land and sea. He
ordered rifles by the thousand instead of by the hundred thousand;
and he actually told his Cabinet that if he could only take one
wing while Lee took the other they would surely beat the North.
Worse still, he and his politicians kept the commissariat under
civilian orders and full of civilian interference, even at the
front, which, in this respect, was always a house divided against
itself.

The little regular army of '61, only sixteen thousand strong, stood
by the Union almost to a man; though a quarter of the officers
went over to the South. Yet the enlisted man was despised even
by the common loafers who would not fight if they could help it.
"Why don't you come in?" asked a zealous lady at a distribution
of patriotic gifts, "aren't you one of our heroes?" "No, ma'am,"
answered the soldier, "I'm only a regular."

The question of command was often a very vexed one; and many mistakes
were made before the final answers came. The most significant of
all emergent facts was this: that though the officers who had been
regulars before the war did not form a hundredth part of all who
held commissions during it, yet these old regulars alone supplied
every successful high commander, Federal and Confederate alike,
both afloat and ashore.

The North had four times as many whites as the South; it used more
blacks as soldiers; and the complete grand total of all the men
who joined its forces during the war reached two millions and
three-quarters. But this gives a quite misleading idea of the real
odds in favor of the North, especially the odds available in battle.
A third of the Northern people belonged to the peace party and
furnished no recruits at all till after conscription came in. The
late introduction of conscription, the abominable substitution
clause, and the prevalence of bounty-jumping combined to reduce
both the quantity and quality of the recruits obtained by money or
compulsion. The Northerners that did fight were generally fighting
in the South, among a very hostile population, which, while it made
the Southern lines of communication perfectly safe, threatened
those of the North at every point and thus obliged the Northern
armies to leave more and more men behind to guard the communications
that each advance made longer still. Finally, the South generally
published the numbers of only its actual combatants, while the
Northern returns always included every