CHAPTER XXXIV.

WORK WITH RAW MATERIALS.

The New Army-Hunting for Brigadiers-Finances-Preparations of the South-Old Guns and New-Presidential Target-Practice-Selection of General McClellan.

WHEN Congress adjourned on the 6th of August, 1861, there was a strong feeling in the minds of its membership, and throughout the country among all men, that to "the Government," meaning by that word, very distinctly, Abraham Lincoln, the President, had been given all that it or he could ask for, and that the war ought, in all reason, to be made a short

one.

A great deal had been given, truly. Every day that passed saw some fresh regiment of enthusiastic volunteers marching, with more or less of regularity in their lines, through the streets of Washington, or into one of the several designated camps of the West and Center. Five hundred thousand men had been voted, and five hundred millions of money. That was a great deal. Men enough to overrun the whole Confederacy, and money enough to pay their expenses. Great things were expected of the President, but no other man living knew so well as he did the marvelous differences between the good "voting" done by the national legislature and the long results of it which had been left for him to realize.

Up to the date of the passage of the Act by which Mr. Lincoln was authorized to accept the services of volunteers, about three hundred thousand men had offered themselves and had been, for the greater part, promptly accepted. They had also been put into training, as efficiently as might be, in such a

famine of military teachers, for the purpose of turning them into soldiers. Quite a large force was already in actual service, but the new law was nevertheless a good thing to have and work under, and the business of recruiting new regiments went forward with great energy.

The organization of such an army presented difficult problems in abundance; but these were met and seized and solved with a sagacity and patience which appears more wonderful as the years go by. The very organic structure of the country, politically, created peculiar features of the situation, and these were not altogether detrimental. The appointments to offices of every grade in the regular army, in all its branches, were in the sole control of the President. It was not so with the volunteers, for these, in a curiously complex way, were still regarded as "State troops," although in the national service. Their regiments were named and numbered as of the several States wherein they were recruited, and all their regimental officers were chosen and commissioned under the laws of the same States. Mr. Lincoln could not appoint so much as a second-lieutenant in a regiment of volunteer infantry. There is one instance recorded of a cavalry regiment from New York reduced to one half its original strength and having lost all its commissioned officers in one way and another, until it was in command of the orderly sergeant of one of its companies. It was necessary to apply to the Governor of New York for a commission for that sergeant as a second-lieutenant, and he passed the succeeding grades to that of major in a few weeks from the date of his first promotion. With the grade of "colonel" the State appointing power terminated and that of the Commander-in-Chief began. With it also began the all but insurmountable difficulties in the way of making even reasonably good selections of "general officers." Much could be done by the employment of graduates of the West Point military school, reappearing now from their long retirements in civil occupations. The regular army itself furnished much good material,

of which such liberal use was made as to interfere seriously with the efficiency of that important arm of the service. The records of the Mexican War were searched to find the names of men who had shown themselves capable of good service. The result may be somewhat illustrated by the career of a well-known officer, a graduate of West Point and of the Mexican War, who marched down Broadway as a volunteer private in a New York regiment, and in a marvelously short time, with small help of his own, save merit, found himself a major-general, in command of a division in the West.

It was a matter of course that the pressure for "general" appointments should be tremendous. Politicians of all parties were anxious for the glory of stars upon their shoulders, with little reference to their personal qualifications for the command of men on a field of battle. Such men actually gathered and carried or forwarded to Mr. Lincoln written "recommendations" for their appointment as brigadiers, in precisely the same manner and of the same kind as if they had been applying for clerkships in the Treasury.

Until the chaos could be reduced to something approaching order, all these papers were kept by Mr. Lincoln in his own office; but they were afterwards transferred to their proper pigeon-holes in the War Department.

The most serious consideration in the appointment or employment of generals arose from the fact that there was yet almost no possibility of knowing who would and who would not prove able to perform well the work so given. Much was necessarily left to the appointing power of events and to the sure selections of actual service; but the untried capacities of all commanding officers gave Mr. Lincoln a most anxious reason for hesitation in risking important military operations at too early a day. There were other reasons for the delays which so severely exercised the pens of the newspaper critics of the Administration.

The details of the processes to be employed in converting

the Congressional grant of "power to raise money" into some specific shape available for the payment of salaries and the purchase of war materials were in the capable hands of Mr. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. The methods proposed by him were such as, on the whole, secured the warm approval and hearty co-operation of the President. The leading financiers of the great Northern cities were very prompt in reaching a comprehensive view of the situation. At an early meeting of the New York bankers certain timid suggestions as to the future value of government bonds were met by an energetic capitalist with the caustic warning: "If you let the government go down, your other securities won't be worth much to speak of. We must let the President have the last cent." The Treasury and its payments became, in a short time, very much an affair of skillful engraving and rapid printing. A similar process was at the same time carried forward, as rapidly but not so skillfully, at the South.

The Confederate Congress had voted its President also a nearly unlimited army, and he was fast assembling it. He had a very good start of Mr. Lincoln, as to time at least, in all preparation and equipment. Some advantages had also been provided for him by Mr. Floyd, President Buchanan's Secretary of War, in transferring quantities of arms from United States arsenals at the North to similar places of deposit within what were now the Confederate army lines. Purchases of war materials at the North and in Europe had been pushed with industry and success until the Southern ports were closed by the blockade and armed forces were stationed at all the points where highways and railroads crossed the boundaries of seceded territory. In every Southern State the work of organizing and drilling soldiers had been pushed with feverish energy for months before Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated. He knew very well how great a disadvantage his raw levies would be under in any collision with better disciplined troops.

The obtaining of men and officers, the turning of these into

soldiers and leaders, constituted one vast tribulation: but it was only a part of the problem that embarrassed Mr. Lincoln. The entire country did not contain enough of serviceable muskets, all patterns counted, to put one in the hands of each man already enlisted. There were not sabers or carbines or pistols for the cavalry; nor guns or caissons or ammunition or suitable harness for the artillery; neither were there wagons for the quartermaster's service and commissariat, or horses yet collected to haul them or to mount the cavalry. Tents were scarce. Clothing was so difficult to obtain that even when the following winter came the system for its full supply had not yet been perfected. The entire machinery and multiform appliances of a brand-new military establishment in camp and field had to be developed from raw materials, and to this task Mr. Lincoln gave his very life.

There was in the upper circles of the ordnance service of the regular army an all but invincible conservatism. It took the form, especially, of a strange prejudice against the adoption of any new invention in the way of arms and equipments. At the same time there was a sweeping epidemic of invention among all the ingenious patriots of the nation. Many, indeed, who were not at all ingenious, but desired to make a little money, caught it also.

Between these two opposing forces Mr. Lincoln was compelled to establish some kind of equilibrium. The manufac ture of improved arms went forward with good rapidity and with a constant effort towards the attainment of uniformity. Government agents in Europe made purchases of such materials as they could find. They found a great deal that they did not purchase, indeed; and every batch of murderous antiquities rejected by an United States inspecting officer was sure to be at once shipped to America on speculative account, to be urged upon the War Department. There was much "political influence" brought to bear on behalf of those curious collections of condemned weapons. Mr. Lincoln was more than once