subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men. Only corporals cared sufficiently little for their position to risk any magnifying of their office by the enforcement of discipline. I make of them an honorable exception, out of regard for the sturdy corporal who, at Ashland, marched six of us (a guard detail) through the very middle of a puddle, assigning as his reason for doing so the fact that "It's plagued little authority they give us corporals, and I mean to use that little, anyhow." With troops of this kind, the reader will readily understand, a feeling of very democratic equality prevailed, so far at least as military rank had anything to do with it. Officers were no better than men, and so officers and men messed and slept together on terms of entire equality, quarreling and even fighting now and then, in a gentlemanly way, but without a thought of allowing differences of military rank to have any influence in the matter. . . There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people is not more sharply drawn anywhere than in Virginia. . . . The man of good family felt himself superior, as in most cases he unquestionably was, to his fellow-soldier of less excellent birth; and this distinction was sufficient, during the early years of the war, to override everything like military rank. In one instance which I remember, a young private asserted his superiority of social standing so effectually as to extort from the lieutenant commanding his company a public apology for an insult offered in the subjection of the private to double duty, as a punishment for absence from roll-call. . . ... It was in this undisciplined state that the men who afterwards made up the army under Lee were sent to the field to meet the enemy at Bull Run and elsewhere, and the only wonder is that they were ever able to fight at all. They were certainly not soldiers. They were as ignorant of the alphabet of obedience as their officers were of the art of commanding. And yet they acquitted themselves reasonably well, a fact which can be explained only by reference to the causes of their insubordination in camp. These men were the people of the South, and the war was their own; wherefore they fought to win it of their own accord and not at all because their officers commanded them to do so. Their personal spirit and their intelligence were their sole elements of strength. Death has few terrors for such men, as compared with dishonor, and so they needed no officers at all, and no discipline, to insure their personal good conduct on the field of battle. . . During the spring and early summer of 1861, the men did not dream that they were to be paid anything for their services or even that the government was to clothe them. They had bought their own uniforms, and whenever these wore out they ordered new ones to be sent, by the first opportunity, from home. . . . The unanimity of the people was simply marvelous. So long as the question of secession was under discussion, opinions were both various and violent. The moment secession was finally determined upon, a revolution was wrought. There was no longer anything to discuss, and so discussion ceased. Men got ready for war, and delicate women with equal spirit sent them off with smiling faces. The man who tarried at home for never so brief a time, after the call to arms had been given, found it necessary to explain himself to every woman of his acquaintance, and no explanation was sufficient to shield him from the social ostracism consequent upon any long tarrying. Throughout the war it was the same, and when the war ended the men who lived to return were greeted with sad faces by those who had cheerfully and even joyously sent them forth to the battle. Under these circumstances, the reader will readily understand, the first call for troops took nearly all the men of Virginia away from their homes. Even the boys in the colleges and schools enlisted, and these establishments were forced to suspend for want of students. In one college the president organized the students, and, making himself their commander, led them directly from the class-room to the field. So strong and all-embracing was the thought that every man owed it to the community to become a soldier, that even clergymen went into the army by the score, and large districts of country were left too without a physician, until the people could secure, by means of a memorial, the unanimous vote of the company to which some favorite physician belonged, declaring it to be his patriotic duty to remain at home. Without such an instruction from his comrades no physician would consent to withdraw, and even with it very many of them preferred to serve in the ranks. These were the men of whom the Confederate army was for the first year or two chiefly composed. After that the conscription brought in a good deal of material which was worse than useless. There were some excellent soldiers who came into the army as conscripts, but they were exceptions to the rule. For the most part the men whose bodies were thus lugged in by force had no spirits to bring with them. . . . They were a leaven of demoralization which the army would have been better without. But they were comparatively few in number, and as the character of the army was crystallized long before these men came into it at all, they had little influence in determining the conduct of the whole. If they added nothing to our strength, they could do little to weaken us, and in any estimate of the character of the Confederate army they hardly count at all. The men who early in the war struggled for a place in the front rank, whenever there was chance of a fight, and thought themselves unlucky if they failed to get it, are the men who gave character afterwards to the well-organized and well-disciplined army which so long contested the ground before Richmond. They did become soldiers after awhile, well regulated and thoroughly effective. The process of disciplining them took away none of their personal spirit or their personal interest in the war, but it taught them the value of unquestioning obedience and the virtue there was in yielding it. I remember very well the extreme coolness with which, in one of the valley skirmishes, a few days before the first battle of Bull Run, a gentleman private in my own company rode out of the ranks for the purpose of suggesting to J. E. B. Stuart the propriety of charging a gun which was shelling us, and which seemed nearer to us than to its supporting infantry. I heard another gentleman without rank, who had brought a dispatch to Stonewall Jackson, request that officer to "cut the answer short," on the ground that his horse was a little lame and he feared his inability to deliver it as promptly as was desirable. ... This personal interest in the war, which in their undisciplined beginning led them into indiscreet meddling with details of policy belonging to their superiors, served to sustain them when as disciplined soldiers they were called upon to bear a degree of hardship of which they had never dreamed. They learned to trust the management of affairs to the officers, asking no questions but finding their own greatest usefulness in cheerful and ready obedience. The wish to help which made them unsoldierly at first, served to make them especially good soldiers when it was duly tempered with discipline and directed by experience. George Cary Eggleston, A Rebel's Recollections, pp. 31-53, passim. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 1875. QUESTIONS What soldierly qualities did the Confederate volunteers of 1861 possess? Illustrate their disregard of discipline. Had the men the habit of unquestioning obedience to their officers? Was there any distinction preserved between officers and men? Explain the strength of social distinctions in the army. According to the writer, was the social class of which he writes unanimous in support of the war? How was the quality of the army weakened by the conscripts of later years? Probably again the same thing was true of the Northern army. The undisciplined volunteers of the first year or two were tremendously in earnest. XLVII WHEN MONEY WAS EASY The cleverness of this description of conditions under a régime of paper money is inimitable. At the same time the facts recorded in it are worth consideration from an economic standpoint. The whole community in the South was very doubtful as to whether this paper money, which was so lavishly issued and so easy to get, would ever be worth its face value in gold or silver. Accordingly, people thought they should get prices for their commodities in paper money many times greater than the ordinary prices of the articles. These prices in depreciated paper were simply regulated by the individual estimates of what prices ought to be. For exact transactions men fell back into the habit of exchanging articles one for the other at their old specie values; and this method which exists in simple and primitive communities replaced the common method of paying for purchases in metallic money. It seems a remarkable fact that during the late Congressional travail with the currency question,1 no one of the people in or out of Congress, who were concerned lest there should not be enough money in the country to "move the crops," ever took upon himself the pleasing task of rehearsing the late Confederacy's financial story, for the purpose of showing by example how simple and easy a thing it is to create wealth out of nothing by magic revolutions of the printing-press, and to make rich, by act of Congress, everybody not too lazy to gather free dollars into a pile. The story has all the flavor of the Princess Scheherezade's 1 He alludes to the pressure for currency to pay harvest hands that occurs every Autumn in the United States. In 1871 and 1873, the Government issued additional paper money to the banks for use in "moving the crops." |