man drawing pay, whether
a combatant or not. On the whole, the North had more than double
numbers, even if compared with a Southern total that includes
noncombatants. But it should be remembered that a Northern army
fighting in the heart of the South, and therefore having to guard
every mile of the way back home, could not meet a Southern one
with equal strength in battle unless it had left the North with
fully twice as many.

Conscription came a year later (1863) in the North than in the
South and was vitiated by a substitution clause. The fact that a
man could buy himself out of danger made some patriots call it "a
rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And the further fact that
substitutes generally became regular bounty-jumpers, who joined
and deserted at will, over and over again, went far to increase the
disgust of those who really served. Frank Wilkeson's _Recollections
of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac_ is a true voice from
the ranks when he explains "how the resort to volunteering, the
unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest
seed-corn of the nation; how it consumed the young, the patriotic,
the intelligent, the generous, and the brave; and how it wasted
the best moral, social, and political elements of the Republic,
leaving the cowards, shirkers, egotists, and moneymakers to stay
at home and procreate their kind."

That is to say, it was so arranged that the foxy-witted lived, while
the lion-hearted died.

The organization of the vast numbers enrolled was excellent whenever
experts were given a free hand. But this free hand was rare. One
vital point only needs special notice here: the wastefulness of
raising new regiments when the old ones were withering away for
want of reinforcements. A new local regiment made a better "story"
in the press; and new and superfluous regiments meant new and
superfluous colonels, mostly of the speechifying kind. So it often
happened that the State authorities felt obliged to humor zealots
set on raising those brand-new regiments which doubled their own
difficulties by having to learn their lesson alone, halved the
efficiency of the old regiments they should have reinforced, and
harassed the commanders and staff by increasing the number of units
that were of different and ever-changing efficiency and strength.
It was a system of making and breaking all through.

The end came when Northern sea-power had strangled the Southern
resou