ed do not
bear comparison with what they did in the prime of their lusty youth,
eighty or ninety years later. The Continentals who had been long drilled
by Washington and Greene were most excellent troops; but they never had
a chance to show at their best, because they were always mixed in with a
mass of poor soldiers, either militia or just-enlisted regulars.

The resolute determination of the Americans to win, their trust in the
justice of their cause, their refusal to be cast down by defeat, the
success with which they overran and conquered the west at the very time
they were struggling for life or death in the east, the heroic grandeur
of their great leader--for all this they deserve full credit. But the
militia who formed the bulk of the Revolutionary armies did not
generally fight well. Sometimes, as at Bunker's Hill and King's
Mountain, they did excellently, and they did better, as a rule, than
similar European bodies--than the Spanish and Portuguese peasants in
1807-12, for instance. At that time it was believed that the American
militia could not fight at all; this was a mistake, and the British paid
dearly for making it; but the opposite belief, that militia could be
generally depended upon, led to quite as bad blunders, and the
politicians of the Jeffersonian school who encouraged the idea made us
in our turn pay dearly for our folly in after years, as at Bladensburg
and along the Niagara frontier in 1812. The Revolutionary war proved
that hastily gathered militia, justly angered and strung to high
purpose, could sometimes whip regulars, a feat then deemed impossible;
but it lacked very much of proving that they would usually do this.
Moreover, even the stalwart fighters who followed Clark and Sevier, and
who did most important and valorous service, cannot point to any one
such desperate deed of fierce courage as that of the doomed Texans under
Bowie and Davy Crockett in the Alamo.

A very slight comparison of the losses suffered in the battles of the
Revolution with those suffered in the battles of the Civil War is
sufficient to show the superiority of the soldiers who fought in the
latter (and a comparison of the tactics and other features of the
conflicts will make the fact even clearer). No Revolutionary regiment or
brigade suffered such a loss as befell the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg,
where it lost 215 out of 263 men, 82 per cent.; the 9th Illinois at
Shiloh, where it lost 366 out of 578 men, 63 per ce