The glaring defeat of most of our volunteer regiments, from the beginning to this day, has lain in slovenliness and remissness as to every department of military duty, except the actual fighting and dying. When it comes to that ultimate test, our men usually endure it so magnificently that one is tempted to overlook all deficiencies on intermediate points. But they must not be overlooked, because they create a fearful discount on the usefulness of our troops, when tried by the standard of regular armies. I do not now refer to the niceties of dress-parade or the courtesies of salutation: it has long since been tacitly admitted that a white American soldier will not present arms to any number of rows of buttons, if he can by any ingenuity evade it; and to shoulder arms on passing an officer is something to which only Ethiopia or the regular army can attain. Grant, if you please, (though I do not grant,) that these are merely points of foolish punctilio. But there are many things which are more than punctilio, though they may be less than fighting. The efficiency of a body of troops depends, after all, not so much on its bravery as on the condition of its sick-list. A regiment which does picket-duty faithfully will often avoid the need of duties more terrible. Yet I have ridden by night along a chain of ten sentinels, every one of whom should have taken my life rather than permit me to give the countersign without dismounting, and have been required to dismount by only four, while two did not ask me for the countersign at all, and two others were asleep. I have ridden through a regimental camp whose utterly filthy condition seemed enough to send malaria through a whole military department, and have been asked by the colonel, almost with tears in his eyes, to explain to him why his men were dying at the rate of one a day. The latter was a regiment nearly a year old, and the former one of almost two years' service, and just from the old Army of the Potomac.
The fault was, of course, in the officers. The officer makes the command, as surely as, in educational matters, the teacher makes the school. There is not a regiment in the army so good that it could not be utterly spoiled in three months by a poor commander, nor so poor that it could not be altogether transformed in six by a good one. The difference in material is nothing,—white or black, German or Irish; so potent is military machinery that an officer who knows his business can make good soldiers out of almost anything, give him but a fair chance. The difference between the present Army of the Potomac and any previous one,—the reason why we do not daily hear, as in the early campaigns, of irresistible surprises, overwhelming numbers, and masked batteries,—the reason why the present movements are a tide and not a wave,—is not that the men are veterans, but that the officers are. There is an immense amount of perfectly raw material in General Grant's force, besides the colored regiments, which in that army are all raw, but in which the Copperhead critics have such faith they would gladly select them for dangers fit for Napoleon's Old Guard. But the newest recruit soon grows steady with a steady corporal at his elbow, a well-trained sergeant behind him, and a captain or a colonel whose voice means something to give commands.
This reference to the colored troops suggests the false impression, still held by many, that special opposition to this important military organization has been made by regular officers. There is no justice in this. While it is very probable that regular officers, as a class, may have had stronger prejudices on this point than others have held, yet it is to be remembered that the chief obstacles have not come from them, nor from military men of any kind, but from civilians at home. Nothing has been more remarkable than the facility with which the expected aversion of the army everywhere vanished before the admirable behavior of the colored troops, and the substantial value of the reinforcements they brought. When it comes to the simple question whether a soldier shall go on duty every night or every other night, he is not critical as to beauty of complexion in the soldier who relieves him.
Some regular officers may have been virulently opposed to the employment of negroes as soldiers, though the few instances which I have known have been far more than compensated by repeated acts of the most substantial kindness from many others. But I never have met one who did not express contempt for the fraud thus far practised by Government on a portion of these troops, by refusing to pay them the wages which the Secretary of War had guarantied. This is a wrong which, but for good discipline, would have long since converted our older colored regiments into a mob of mutineers, and which, while dishonestly saving the Government a few thousand dollars, has virtually sacrificed hundreds of thousands in its discouraging effect upon enlistments, at a time when the fate of the nation may depend upon a few regiments more or less. It is in vain for national conventions to make capital by denouncing massacres like that of Fort Pillow, and yet ignore this more deliberate injustice for which some of their own members are in part responsible. The colored soldiers will take their own risk of capture and maltreatment very readily, (since they must take it on themselves at any rate,) if the Government will let its justice begin at home, and pay them their honest earnings. It is of little consequence to a dying man whether any one else is to die by retaliation, but it is of momentous consequence whether his wife and family are to be cheated of half his scanty earnings by the nation for which he dies. The Rebels may be induced to concede the negro the rights of war, when we grant him the ordinary rights of peace, namely, to be paid the price agreed upon. Jefferson Davis and the London "Times"—one-half whose stock-in-trade is "the inveterate meanness of the Yankee"—will hardly be converted to sound morals by the rebukes of an administration which allows its Secretary of War to promise a black soldier thirteen dollars a month, pay him seven, and shoot him if he grumbles. From this crowning injustice the regular army, and, indeed, the whole army, is clear; to civilians alone belongs this carnival of fraud.
If, in some instances, terrible injustice has been done to the black soldiers in their military treatment also, it has not been only, or chiefly, under regular officers. Against the cruel fatigue duty imposed upon them last summer, in the Department of the South, for instance, must be set the more disastrous mismanagements of the Department of the Gulf,—the only place from which we now hear the old stories of disease and desertion,—all dating back to the astonishing blunder of organizing the colored regiments of half-size at the outset, with a full complement of officers. This measure, however agreeable it might have been to the horde of aspirants for commissions, was in itself calculated to destroy all self-respect in the soldiers, being based on the utterly baseless assumption that they required twice as many officers as whites, and was foredoomed to failure, because no esprit de corps can be created in a regiment which is from the first insignificant in respect to size. It is scarcely conceivable that any regular officer should have honestly fallen into such an error as this; and it is very certain that the wisest suggestions and the most efficient action have proceeded, since the beginning, from them. It will be sufficient to mention the names of Major-General Hunter, Brigadier-General Phelps, and Adjutant-General Thomas; and one there is whose crowning merits deserve a tribute distinct even from these.
When some future Bancroft or Motley writes with philosophic brain and poet's hand the story of the Great Civil War, he will find the transition to a new era in our nation's history to have been fitly marked by one festal day,—that of the announcement of the President's Proclamation, upon Port-Royal Island, on the first of January, 1863. That New-Year's time was our second contribution to the great series of historic days, beads upon the rosary of the human race, permanent festivals of freedom. Its celebration was one beside whose simple pageant the superb festivals of other lands might seem but glittering counterfeits. Beneath a majestic grove of the great live-oaks which glorify the South-Carolina soil a liberated people met to celebrate their own peaceful emancipation. They came thronging, by land and water, from plantations which their own self-imposed and exemplary industry was beginning already to redeem. The military escort which surrounded them had been organized out of their own numbers, and had furnished to the nation the first proof of the capacity of their race to bear arms. The key-note of the meeting was given by spontaneous voices, whose unexpected anthem took the day from the management of well-meaning patrons, and swept all away into the great currents of simple feeling. It was a scene never to be forgotten: the moss-hung trees, with their hundred-feet diameter of shade; the eager faces of women and children in the foreground; the many-colored headdresses; the upraised hands; the neat uniforms of the soldiers; the outer row of mounted officers and ladies; and beyond all the blue river, with its swift, free tide. And at the centre of all this great and joyous circle stood modestly the man on whose personal integrity and energy, more than on any President or Cabinet, the hopes of all that multitude appeared to rest,—who commanded then among his subjects, and still commands, an allegiance more absolute than any European potentate can claim,—whose name will be forever illustrious as having first made a practical reality out of that Proclamation which then was to the President only an autograph, and to the Cabinet only a dream,—who, when the whole fate of the slaves and of the Government hung trembling in the balance, decided it forever by throwing into the scale the weight of one resolute man,—who personally mustered in the first black regiment, and personally governed the first community where emancipation was a success,—who taught the relieved nation, in fine, that there was strength and safety in those dusky millions who till then had been an incubus and a terror,—Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, Military Governor of South Carolina. The single career of this one man more than atones for all the traitors whom West Point ever nurtured, and awards the highest place on the roll of our practical statesmanship to the regular army.
THE TOTAL DEPRAVITY OF INANIMATE THINGS.
I am confident, that, at the annunciation of my theme, Andover, Princeton, and Cambridge will skip like rams, and the little hills of East Windsor, Meadville, and Fairfax, like lambs. However divinity-schools may refuse to "skip" in unison, and may butt and batter each other about the doctrine and origin of human depravity, all will join devoutly in the credo, I believe in the total depravity of inanimate things.
The whole subject lies in a nutshell, or rather an apple-skin. We have clerical authority for affirming that all its miseries were let loose upon the human race by "them greenins" tempting our mother to curious pomological speculations; and from that time till now—Longfellow, thou reasonest well!—"things are not what they seem," but are diabolically otherwise,—masked-batteries, nets, gins, and snares of evil.