despised even by the common loafers who would not fight if they
could help it. "Why don't you come in?" asked a zealous lady at a
distribution of patriotic gifts, "aren't you one of our heroes?"
"No, ma'am," answered the soldier, "I'm only a regular."

The question of command was often a very vexed one; and many
mistakes were made before the final answers came. The most
significant of all emergent facts was this: that though the
officers who had been regulars before the war did not form a
hundredth part of all who held commissions during it, yet these
old regulars alone supplied every successful high commander,
Federal and Confederate alike, both afloat and ashore.

The North had four times as many whites as the South; it used
more blacks as soldiers; and the complete grand total of all the
men who joined its forces during the war reached two millions and
three-quarters. But this gives a quite misleading idea of the
real odds in favor of the North, especially the odds available in
battle. A third of the Northern people belonged to the peace
party and furnished no recruits at all till after conscription
came in. The late introduction of conscription, the abominable
substitution clause, and the prevalence of bounty-jumping
combined to reduce both the quantity and quality of the recruits
obtained by money or compulsion. The Northerners that did fight
were generally fighting in the South, among a very hostile
population, which, while it made the Southern lines of
communication perfectly safe, threatened those of the North at
every point and thus obliged the Northern armies to leave more
and more men behind to guard the communications that each advance
made longer still. Finally, the South generally published the