Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/389

 in life and every grade of intelligence. What was the government to do to provide the military organizations so formed, with the necessary officers? Our regular army was very small, its officers few. A comparatively large number of these few, who had been educated at the West Point Academy, had gone over to the service of the Southern Confederacy. Of those who remained, some had to stay with their regiments, while others were given commands with the volunteer troops. A few graduates of West Point, who had left the service, re-entered it, and were put at the head of regiments, brigades, divisions, corps, or armies. There were also a few men who had served as officers in State militia organizations, and had thus acquired a smattering of infantry or cavalry tactics in most cases not going beyond the drill of a platoon or a company. But the vast majority of the officers' positions, from lieutenancies up to generalships, had to be filled with persons taken from civil life who had no schooling in military service at all, but were selected on account of their general intelligence and their position among their fellow-citizens, which seemed to fit them for leadership on a smaller or larger scale. They would be obliged to learn the military business as they went on, and it was expected that soon the real military capacity and fitness for command would show itself. This is the way the great volunteer army was created, and the only way it could have been created. On the side of the Southern Confederacy the method of organization was substantially the same. There was, therefore, nothing out of the common, nothing of unusual favoritism, in my appointment as a brigadier general of volunteers. I had, perhaps, even a little advantage over many of my colleagues who had been appointed to the same grade on the same principle, in the military studies I had constantly and arduously pursued ever since my short service in