An Improved Army.
Published: August 20, 1861
In calling to Washington the incomplete regiments of the Eastern and Middle States, the Government either confesses its fears as to the safety of the Capital, or proposes to introduce a new system into the muster and organization of its Armies. If we are to receive the latter interpretation of the measure, we may accept it as one of the very highest promise: The earliest rally for the protection of the seat of Government necessarily originated in the spontaneous patriotism of the masses, which rendered anything like selection or discrimination entirely impossible. All who offered were, unless physically incapacitated, mustered into service. That among these raw and quite inexperienced bodies of men, numbers should find a place whose motives were sordidly confined to pay and plunder, and who, incapable of understanding, or regarding with indifference, the great questions at issue, cared nothing for their eventual solution, was to be anticipated; and we might naturally expect to find insubordination in camp and cowardice in action among this class of the National defenders.
But even when the first dangerous crisis had passed, other causes contributed to mix a mischievous leaven of this description with every regiment sent to the war. There were Colonels whose commissions depended upon their production of a certain number of men, and Captains and Lieutenants whose claims to rank depended upon the same numerical test. Any featherless biped, not actually tainted with disease, met all the requirements of this system of recruiting. Thieves and vagabonds were as available as good men and true. How many enlisted as the alternative of starvation, calculating on an opportunity of escape from the perils after they had enjoyed the profits of war -- and how many took service upon the same speculative chances which invite rogues to a great conflagration, it is impossible at present to tell. But there is every reason to believe that the National need in the first instance, and individual recklessness subsequently, brought multitudes of such men to the ranks, and that we arc still paying the penalty of so vicious a method of constructing an Army.
The disaster at Bull Run showed the practical value of material thus hastily amassed. Had there been in the National Army a nucleus of veteran troops accustomed to the encounters of the battle-field, it is eminently probable that no such panic as carried our inexperienced troops away from what was really a field of victory, would have become general and fatal. But in the absence of this reliance, it was not to be expected that a raw soldiery, unfamiliar with all the -fearful sights and sounds of mortal conflict, and distributed sparsely over a broken country, where the eye might seek in vain for a corrective to panic fears in the presence and success of other detachments of the Army, would be proof to the cowardly demonstration which the first round of a hostile battery, or the first volley of hostile musketry, would produce in that viler material of our Army, who never went and never meant to fight. A score of vagabonds and poltroons in a regiment is as effective in thus creating a panic as thrice the number. And we may derive consolation from the fact, that all those grand Armies which the French Revolution set in the field, were in their earlier campaigns attended with similar disasters, from the same causes as those which have already brought us to shame; and yet when the bad material had been purged by desertion, dismissal and death, and veterans alone were left, those Armies had their Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena.
In reserving the organization of companies and regiments to be perfected at Washington, our military leaders give reason to hope that that some judicious principle of selection is to be employed. The practiced eye of the accomplished drill-officer readily detects the men who will damage rather than strengthen the service, and will assign them to a description of duty where they will be less liable to do mischief. To officers of such experience let the task of organization be intrusted, and we shall no longer have cowards in the ranks, to communicate the contagion of their tears to better men, and snatch from real courage and patriotism the victory they have almost grasped.