Page:Harris Dickson--The unpopular history of the United States.djvu/144

The Unpopular History of the United States to cover the Sahara Desert with a dime's worth of butter.

And, considering what happened during the Civil War from a strictly military viewpoint, we find that our standards of comparison are wholly different from those of previous wars, for here the great bulk of soldiers on both sides were raw recruits at the beginning. On both sides, however, they got such a hard and continuous service as to weld them into iron veterans, equal to the Old Guard of Napoleon. So I shall merely give a few instances to prove that the same faults and inefficiencies observable from Revolutionary times had not disappeared.

On March 26, 1861, the Confederate President called for 100,000 men to take the field for the period of one year under his unquestioned and supreme command. The few United States regulars were scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific, too far away to participate in the first shock of arms. President Lincoln, of course, called for militia. President and Cabinet showing a fatuous [126]