ring the promotion of the
meritorious had been adopted; but this in no way diminishes the
force of his testimony that every kind of military ability was
abundantly found in our volunteer forces and needed only recognition
and encouragement. It would be easy to multiply evidence on this
subject. General Grant is a witness whose opinion alone may be
treated as conclusive. In his Personal Memoirs [Footnote: Personal
Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. i. p. 573.] he explicitly and
unqualifiedly says that at the close of the Vicksburg campaign his
troops fulfilled every requirement of an army, and his volunteer
officers were equal to any duty, some of them being in his judgment
competent to command an independent army in the field. Sherman fully
shared this opinion. [Footnote: Letter to Halleck, Official Records,
vol. xxxix. pt. iii. p. 413.]

In trying to form a just estimate of the officers of the regular
army in 1861, we have to consider not only their education, but the
character of their military life and experience up to that time. It
is, on the whole, a salutary popular notion that "professionals" in
any department of work are more likely to succeed than amateurs. At
the beginning of the Civil War our only professional soldiers were
the officers of our little regular army, nearly all of whom were
graduates of the West Point Military Academy. Since the Mexican War
of 1848, petty conflicts with Indians on the frontier had been their
only warlike experience. The army was hardly larger than a single
division, and its posts along the front of the advancing wave of
civilization from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the Canada border
were so numerous that it was a rare thing to see more than two or
three companies of soldiers together. To most of the officers their
parade of the battalion of cadets at West Point was the largest
military assemblage they had ever seen. Promotion had been so slow
that the field officers were generally superannuated, and very few
who had a rank higher than that of captain at the close of 1860 did
any active field work on either side during the Civil War. The total
number of captains and lieutenants of the line would hardly have
furnished colonels for the volunteer regiments of the single State
of New York as they were finally mustered into the National service
during the war; and they would have fallen far short of it when
their own numbers were divided by the rebellion itself.

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