Though the future hero had made no parade of himself or his accomplishments, several regiments desired to elect him as their colonel; but for reasons of his own, which do not appear,—though I suspect that his military prejudice against electing officers was the strongest one,—he declined all these overtures. One who knew him better than others suggested to the governor that he should appoint him to some regiment, without previously consulting him. The suggestion was acted upon, and Captain Grant was appointed colonel of the Twenty-first Regiment of Infantry. The commission was promptly accepted, and Colonel Grant hastened to Mattoon, where the regiment was in camp, and assumed the command.
[CHAPTER IX.]
Wherein Captain Galligasken has Something to say about Citizen Soldiers, and follows the illustrious Soldier into the Field in Missouri.
The "thinking bayonets" of the United States army, in a merely disciplinary point of view, were not at first the best of material of which to make soldiers. To a vastly greater extent than any other armies which have been gathered since the foundations of the earth were laid, they were composed of intelligent, educated men. They could read and write, and were competent to do their own thinking, and to form their own judgments. They had ideas of their own in regard to the war, and the means of carrying it on.
The men in the ranks, as well as those with warrants and commissions in their pockets, were, without many exceptions, the graduates of the free schools which are the greatest glory of the nation. They read the newspapers, the potent educators of the people. They were the village politicians, the schoolmasters, the printers, the intelligent mechanics, the merchants, ministers, lawyers, and doctors of the country. There was no pursuit or profession in the land which was not represented in the volunteer army.
All of them were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of our democratic institutions. Each man in the rank and file of the grand army, as a citizen, was the peer of the president, the governor of his state, or of the mightiest man of the nation. Any infraction of their rights they were ready to resent and resist. Regarded, therefore, as the mere insensate humanity of which an army is composed, they were not the most hopeful material. Blindly to obey without question, heavily to be hampered with the details of what seemed to them needless restrictions and regulations, meekly to ignore their own will, and follow unchallenged the will of another, was a condition of life for which their education and habits had not prepared them. They were willing to fight to the death, but to become mere stupid machines, moved by their officers, was at first hardly within the scope of their democratic philosophy. Even while they acknowledged the necessity of strict discipline, and advocated its enforcement, the details of the daily routine pinched them severely.
The officers of the regular army were rigid disciplinarians. Those who had been in the service had been accustomed to different and coarser material than that which formed the volunteer army. Their men had never had a voice in choosing their officers, whose responsibility was in the direction of the War Department, and not at all in the direction of the force they commanded. It had been their province to command, as it had been that of their men to obey, not only on the battle-field, but in all the minutiæ of the camp and the garrison. One of these soldiers could be punished for neglecting to button his coat on parade, or to clean the spot of rust from the barrel of his musket; for being two inches short of the regulation step, or for a degree of variation in the angle of his feet in the line. Men who had left the plough in the furrow on the farm which they had paid for and owned, to fight the battles of the republic, were at least impatient under such restraints.