Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (Vol.1&2). Jacob D. Cox
correspondents of the press had been excluded from the camps, there would no doubt have been surreptitious correspondence which would have found its way into print through private and roundabout channels. But this again was not a vice peculiar to officers appointed from civil life. It should be always remembered that honorable conduct and devoted patriotism was the rule, and self-seeking vanity and ambition the exception; yet a few exceptions would be enough to disturb the comfort of a large command. To sum up, the only fair way to estimate the volunteer army is by its work and its fitness for work after the formative period was passed, and when the inevitable mistakes and the necessary faults of its first organization had been measurably cured. My settled judgment is that it took the field in the spring of 1862 as well fitted for its work as any army in the world, its superior excellences in the most essential points fully balancing the defects which were incident to its composition.
This opinion is not the offspring of partiality toward the volunteer army on the part of one himself a volunteer. It was shared by the most active officers in the field who came from the regular service. In their testimony given in various ways during the war, in their Official Records, and in their practical conduct in the field which showed best of all where their reliance was placed, these officers showed their full faith in and admiration for the volunteer regiments. Such an opinion was called out by the Committee on the Conduct of the War in its examination of General Gibbon in regard to the Gettysburg campaign, and his judgment may fairly be taken as that of the better class of the regular officers. He declared of some of these regiments in his division, that they were as well disciplined as any men he ever wished to see; that their officers had shown practical military talent; that a young captain from civil life, whom he instanced, was worthy to be made a general. He named regiments of volunteers which he said were among the finest regiments that ever fought on any field, and in which every officer was appointed from civil life. 2 He added the criticism which I have above made, that no proper method of getting rid of incompetent officers and of securing the promotion of the meritorious had been adopted; but this in no way diminishes the force of his testimony that every kind of military ability was abundantly found in our volunteer forces and needed only recognition and encouragement. It would be easy to multiply evidence on this subject. General Grant is a witness whose opinion alone may be treated as conclusive. In his Personal Memoirs 3 he explicitly and unqualifiedly says that at the close of the Vicksburg campaign his troops fulfilled every requirement of an army, and his volunteer officers were equal to any duty, some of them being in his judgment competent to command an independent army in the field. Sherman fully shared this opinion. 4
In trying to form a just estimate of the officers of the regular army in 1861, we have to consider not only their education, but the character of their military life and experience up to that time. It is, on the whole, a salutary popular notion that "professionals" in any department of work are more likely to succeed than amateurs. At the beginning of the Civil War our only professional soldiers were the officers of our little regular army, nearly all of whom were graduates of the West Point Military Academy. Since the Mexican War of 1848, petty conflicts with Indians on the frontier had been their only warlike experience. The army was hardly larger than a single division, and its posts along the front of the advancing wave of civilization from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the Canada border were so numerous that it was a rare thing to see more than two or three companies of soldiers together. To most of the officers their parade of the battalion of cadets at West Point was the largest military assemblage they had ever seen. Promotion had been so slow that the field officers were generally superannuated, and very few who had a rank higher than that of captain at the close of 1860 did any active field work on either side during the Civil War. The total number of captains and lieutenants of the line would hardly have furnished colonels for the volunteer regiments of the single State of New York as they were finally mustered into the National service during the war; and they would have fallen far short of it when their own numbers were divided by the rebellion itself.
Our available professional soldiers, then, were captains and subalterns whose experience was confined to company duty at frontier posts hundreds of miles from civilization, except in the case of the engineers, the staff corps, and some of the artillery in sea-coast forts. With the same exceptions, the opportunities for enlarging their theoretic knowledge had been small. It was before the days of post libraries, and books of any sort were a rarity at the garrisons. In the first year of the war, I expressed to General Gordon Granger my surprise at finding how little most line officers had added to the theoretic reading they got at the academy. "What could you expect," he said in his sweeping way, "of men who have had to spend their lives at a two-company post, where there was nothing to do when off duty but play draw-poker and drink whiskey at the sutler's shop?" This was, of course, meant to be picturesquely extravagant, but it hit the nail on the head, after all. Some of the officers of the old regime did not conceal their contempt for books. It was a stock story in the army that when the Utah expedition was fitting out in 1856, General Henry Hunt, chief of artillery of the army of the Potomac, then a young artillery officer, applied to General Twiggs, from whose command part of the expedition was making up, for leave to take a little box of military books. "No, sir," was the peremptory response; "no room in the train for such nonsense." Hunt retired chop-fallen; but soon after another officer came in, with "General, our mess has a keg of very nice whiskey we don't want to lose; won't you direct the quartermaster to let it go in the wagons?" "Oh yes, sir. Oh yes, anything in reason!" If not true, the story is good enough to be true, as its currency attests; but whether true or no, the "fable teaches" that post-graduate study in the old army was done under difficulties.
The course of study at West Point had narrower limitations than most people think, and it would be easy to be unfair by demanding too much of the graduates of that military college. The course of study was of four years, but the law forbade any entrance examinations on subjects outside of the usual work done in the rural common schools. The biographies of Grant, of Sherman, of Sheridan, of Ormsby Mitchell, and of others show that they in fact had little or no other preparatory education than that of the common country school. 5 The course of study and amount of education given must necessarily be limited, therefore, to what boys of average ability and such preparation could accomplish in the four years. They were no further advanced, on entering, than they would have to be to enter any ordinary fitting school for one of our first-class colleges, or the high schools in the graded systems of public schools in our cities. Three years of study would put them abreast of students entering college elsewhere, and four years would carry them about as far as the end of the Freshman year in Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. The corps of professors and teachers at West Point has always deservedly ranked high as instructors, but there is no "royal road" to knowledge, and it cannot be claimed that three or four years at the Military Academy would count for more, as general education, than the same period spent in any other good school. A very few men of high standing in the classes supplemented their education by obtaining appointments as temporary instructors in the academy after graduating, but most of them left their books behind them and began at once the subaltern's life at the distant frontier post.
If we analyze the course of study they pursued, we find that it covered two years' work in mathematics, one in physics and chemistry, and one in construction of fortifications. This was the scientific part, and was the heaviest part of the curriculum. Then, besides a little English, mental philosophy, moral philosophy, and elementary law, there were two years' study of the French and one of Spanish. This was the only linguistic study, and began with the simplest elements. At the close of the war there was no instruction in strategy or grand tactics, in military history, or in what is called the Art of War. The little book by Mahan on Out-post Duty was the only text-book in Theory, outside the engineering proper. At an earlier day they had used Jomini's introduction to his "Grandes Opérations Militaires," and I am unable to say when its use was dropped. It is not my wish to criticise the course of study; on the other hand, I doubt if it could be much improved for boys who had only the preparation required by the law. But since we are trying to estimate its completeness as professional education fitting men to command armies