The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

I close these papers, with my eye resting upon the same stretch of fields,—the wooded border of a river,—the twinkling roofs and spires flanked by hills and sea,—where my eye rested when I began this story of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches of Ithaca. And I take a pleasure in feeling that the farm-practice over all the fields below me rests upon the cumulated authorship of so long a line of teachers. Yon open furrow, over which the herbage has closed, carries trace of the ridging in the "Works and Days"; the brown field of half-broken clods is the fallow (Νεος) of Xenophon; the drills belong to Worlidge; their culture with the horse-hoe is at the order of Master Tull. Young and Cobbett are full of their suggestions; Lancelot Brown has ordered away a great straggling hedge-row; and Sir Uvedale Price has urged me to spare a hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the walling, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cherries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hemlocks and soft maples, for "a contemplative man's recreation." Davy long ago caught all the fermentation of my manure-heap in his retort, and Thomson painted for me the scene which is under my window to-day. Mowbray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the songs of all the birds are caught and repeated to the echo in the pages of the poets which lie here under my hand; through the prism of their verse, Patrick the cattle-tender changes to a lithe milkmaid, against whose ankles the buttercups nod rejoicingly, and Rosamund (which is the nurse) wakes all Arden (which is Edgewood) with a rich burst of laughter.

And shall I not be grateful to these my patrons? And shall I count it unworthy to pass these few in-door hours of rain in the emblazonment of their titles?

Nor must I forget here to express my indebtedness to those kind friends who have from time to time favored me with suggestions or corrections, in the course of these papers, and to those others—not a few—who have lent me rare old books of husbandry, which are not easily laid hold of.

I have discussed no works of living authors, whether of practical or pastoral intent: at some future day I may possibly pay my compliments to them. Meantime I cannot help interpolating in the interest of my readers a little fragment of a letter addressed to me within the year by the lamented Hawthorne:—"I remember long ago your speaking prospectively of a farm; but I never dreamed of your being really much more of a farmer than myself, whose efforts in that line only make me the father of a progeny of weeds in a garden-patch. I have about twenty-five acres of land, seventeen of which are a hill of sand and gravel, wooded with birches, locusts, and pitch-pines, and apparently incapable of any other growth; so that I have great comfort in that part of my territory. The other eight acres are said to be the best land in Concord, and they have made me miserable, and would soon have ruined me, if I had not determined nevermore to attempt raising anything from them. So there they lie along the roadside, within their broken fence, an eyesore to me, and a laughing-stock to all the neighbors. If it were not for the difficulty of transportation by express or otherwise, I would thankfully give you those eight acres."

And now the fine, nervous hand, which wrought with such strange power and beauty, is stilled forever! The eight acres can well lie neglected; for upon a broader field, as large as humanity, and at the hands of thousands of reapers who worked for love, he has gathered in a great harvest of immortelles.

REGULAR AND VOLUNTEER OFFICERS

It is pleasant to see how much the present war has done towards effacing the traditional jealousy between regular officers and volunteers. The two classes have been so thoroughly intermingled, on staff-duties and in the field,—so many regular officers now hold in the volunteer service a rank higher than their permanent standing,—the whole previous military experience of most regulars was so trifling, compared with that which they and the volunteers have now shared in common,—and so many young men have lately been appointed to commissions, in both branches, not only without a West-Point education, but with almost none at all,—that it really cannot be said that there is much feeling of conscious separation left. For treating the two as antagonistic the time has clearly gone by. For judiciously weighing their respective services in the field the epoch has not come, since the reign of history begins only when that of telegrams and special correspondents has ended. It is better, therefore, to limit the comparison, as yet, to that minor routine of military duty upon which the daily existence of an army depends, and of which the great deeds of daring are merely exciting episodes.

At the beginning of the war, and before the distinction was thus partially effaced, the comparison involved very different elements. In our general military inexperience, the majority were not disposed to underrate the value of specific professional training. Education holds in this country much of the prestige held by hereditary rank in Europe, modified only by the condition that the possessor shall take no undue airs upon himself. Even then the penalty consists only in a few outbreaks of superficial jealousy, and the substantial respect for any real acquirements remains the same. So there was a time when the faintest aroma of West Point lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission. Any Governor felt a certain relief in intrusting a regiment to any man who had ever eaten clandestine oysters at Benny Haven's, or had once heard the whiz of an Indian arrow on the frontier, however mediocre might have been all his other claims to confidence. If he failed, the regular army might bear the shame; if he succeeded, to the State-House be the glory.

Yet there was always another party of critics, not less intelligent, who urged the value of general preparations for any duty, as compared with special,—who held that it was always easier for a man of brains to acquire technical skill than for a person of mere technicality to superadd brains, and that the antecedents of a frontier lieutenant were, on the whole, a poorer training for large responsibilities than those of many a civilian, who had lived in the midst of men, though out of uniform. Let us have a fair statement of this position, for it was very sincere and had much temporary influence. The main thing, it was argued, was the knowledge of human nature and the habit of dealing with mankind in masses,—the very thing from which the younger regular officers at least had been rigidly excluded. From a monastic life at West Point they had usually been transferred to a yet more isolated condition, in some obscure outpost,—or if otherwise, then they had seen no service at all, and were mere clerks in shoulder-straps. But a lawyer who could manœuvre fifty witnesses as if they were one,—a teacher used to governing young men by the hundred,—an orator trained to sway thousands,—a master-mechanic,—a railway-superintendent,—a factory-agent,—a broker who could harness Wall Street and drive it,—a financier who could rule a sovereign State with a rod of (railway) iron,—such men as these, it was plausibly reasoned, could give an average army-officer all the advantage of his special training, at the start, and yet beat him at his own trade in a year.

These theories were naturally strengthened, moreover, by occasional instances of conspicuous failure, when volunteer troops were intrusted to regular officers. These disappointments could usually be traced to very plain causes. The men selected were sometimes men whose West-Point career would hardly bear minute investigation,—or who had in civil pursuits forgotten all they had learned at the Academy, except self-esteem,—or who had been confined to the duties of some special department, as quartermasters or paymasters, and were really fitted for nothing else,—or who had served their country by resigning their commissions, if not by holding them,—or who had contrived, first or last, to lose hopelessly their tempers or their digestions, or their faith, hope, and charity. Beyond all this lay the trouble, that the best regular officer from the very fact of his superior training was puzzled to know how much to demand of volunteer troops, or what standard to enforce upon them. It was a problem in the Differential Calculus, with the Army Regulations for a constant, and a raw volunteer regiment for a variable, and not a formula in Davies which suited the purpose. Unfortunately, these perplexities were quite as apt to end in relaxation as in rigor, so that the regiments thus commanded sometimes slid into a looseness of which a resolute volunteer officer would have been ashamed.

These were among the earlier results. Against them was to be set the fact, that, on the whole, no regiments in the field made progress so rapid, or held their own so well, as those placed under regular officers. And now that three years have abolished many surmises, and turned many others into established facts, it must be owned that the total value of the professional training has proved far greater, and that of the general preparation far less, than many intelligent observers predicted. The relation between officer and soldier is something so different in kind from anything which civil life has to offer, that it has proved almost impossible to transfer methods or maxims from the one to the other. If a regiment is merely a caucus, and the colonel the chairman,—or merely a fire-company, and the colonel the foreman,—or merely a prayer-meeting, and the colonel the moderator,—or merely a bar-room, and the colonel the landlord,—then the failure of the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. War is not the highest of human pursuits, certainly; but an army comes very near to being the completest of human organizations, and he alone succeeds in it who readily accepts its inevitable laws, and applies them. An army is an aristocracy, on a three-years' lease, supposing that the period of enlistment. No mortal skill can make military power effective on democratic principles. A democratic people can perhaps carry on a war longer and better than any other; because no other can so well comprehend the object, raise the means, or bear the sacrifices. But these sacrifices include the surrender, for the time being, of the essential principle of the government. Personal independence in the soldier, like personal liberty in the civilian, must be waived for the preservation of the nation. With shipwreck staring men in the face, the choice lies between despotism and anarchy, trusting to the common sense of those concerned, when the danger is over, to revert to the old safeguards. It is precisely because democracy is an advanced stage in human society, that war, which belongs to a less advanced stage, is peculiarly inconsistent with its habits. Thus the undemocratic character, so often lamented in West Point and Annapolis, is in reality their strong point. Granted that they are no more appropriate to our stage of society than are revolvers and bowie-knives, that is precisely what makes them all serviceable in time of war. War being exceptional, the institutions which train its officers must be exceptional likewise.

The first essential for military authority lies in the power of command,—a power which it is useless to analyze, for it is felt instinctively, and it is seen in its results. It is hardly too much to say, that, in military service, if one has this power, all else becomes secondary; and it is perfectly safe to say that without it all other gifts are useless. Now for the exercise of power there is no preparation like power, and nowhere is this preparation to be found, in this community, except in regular army-training. Nothing but great personal qualities can give a man by nature what is easily acquired by young men of very average ability who are systematically trained to command.

The criticism habitually made upon our army by foreign observers at the beginning of the war continues still to be made, though in a rather less degree,—that the soldiers are relatively superior to the officers, so that the officers lead, perhaps, but do not command them. The reason is plain. Three years are not long enough to overcome the settled habits of twenty years. The weak point of our volunteer service invariably lies here, that the soldier, in nine cases out of ten, utterly detests being commanded, while the officer, in his turn, equally shrinks from commanding. War, to both, is an episode in life, not a profession, and therefore military subordination, which needs for its efficiency to be fixed and absolute, is, by common consent, reduced to a minimum. The white American soldier, being, doubtless, the most intelligent in the world, is more ready than any other to comply with a reasonable order, but he does it because it is reasonable, not because it is an order. With advancing experience his compliance increases, but it is still because he better and better comprehends the reason. Give him an order that looks utterly unreasonable,—and this is sometimes necessary,—or give him one which looks trifling, under which head all sanitary precautions are yet too apt to rank, and you may, perhaps, find that you still have a free and independent citizen to deal with, not a soldier. Implicit obedience must be admitted still to be a rare quality in our army; nor can we wonder at it. In many cases there is really no more difference between officers and men, in education or in breeding, than if the one class were chosen by lot from the other; all are from the same neighborhood, all will return to the same civil pursuits side by side; every officer knows that in a little while each soldier will again become his client or his customer, his constituent or his rival. Shall he risk offending him for life in order to carry out some hobby of stricter discipline? If this difficulty exist in the case of commissioned officers, it is still more the case with the non-commissioned, those essential intermediate links in the chain of authority. Hence the discipline of our soldiers has been generally that of a town-meeting or of an engine-company, rather than that of an army; and it shows the extraordinary quality of the individual men, that so much has been accomplished with such a formidable defect in the organization. Even granting that there has been a great and constant improvement, the evil is still vast enough. And every young man trained at West Point enters the service with at least this advantage, that he has been brought up to command, and has not that task to learn.

He has this further advantage, that he is brought up with some respect for the army-organization as it is, with its existing rules, methods, and proprieties, and is not, like the newly commissioned civilian, disposed in his secret soul to set aside all its proprieties as mere "pipe-clay," its methods as "old-fogyism," and its rules as "red-tape." How many good volunteer officers will admit, if they speak candidly, that on entering the service they half believed the "Army Regulations" to be a mass of old-time rubbish, which they would gladly reëdit, under contract, with immense improvements, in a month or two,—and that they finally left the service with the conviction that the same book was a mine of wisdom, as yet but half explored! Certainly, when one thinks for what a handful of an army our present military system was devised, and with what an admirable elasticity it has borne this sudden and stupendous expansion, it must be admitted to have most admirably stood the test. Of course, there has been much amendment and alteration needed, nor is the work done yet; but it has mainly touched the details, not the general principles. The system is wonderfully complete for its own ends, and the more one studies it the less one sneers. Many a form which at first seems to the volunteer officer merely cumbrous and trivial he learns to prize at last as almost essential to good discipline; he seldom attempts a short cut without finding it the longest way, and rarely enters on that heroic measure of cutting red-tape without finding at last that he has entangled his own fingers in the process.

More thorough training tells in another way. It is hard to appreciate, without the actual experience, how much of military life is a matter of mere detail. The maiden at home fancies her lover charging at the head of his company, when in reality he is at that precise moment endeavoring to convince his company-cooks that salt-junk needs five hours' boiling, or is anxiously deciding which pair of worn-out trousers shall be ejected from a drummer-boy's knapsack. Courage is, no doubt, a good quality in a soldier, and luckily not often wanting; but, in the long run, courage depends largely on the haversack. Men are naturally brave, and when the crisis comes, almost all men will fight well, if well commanded. As Sir Philip Sidney said, an army of stags led by a lion is more formidable than an army of lions led by a stag. Courage is cheap; the main duty of an officer is to take good care of his men, so that every one of them shall be ready, at a moment's notice, for any reasonable demand. A soldier's life usually implies weeks and months of waiting, and then one glorious hour; and if the interval of leisure has been wasted, there is nothing but a wasted heroism at the end, and perhaps not even that. The penalty for misused weeks, the reward for laborious months, may be determined within ten minutes. Without discipline an army is a mob, and the larger the worse; without rations the men are empty uniforms; without ammunition they might as well have no guns; without shoes they might almost as well have no legs. And it is in the practical appreciation of all these matters that the superiority of the regular officer is apt to be shown.

Almost any honest volunteer officer will admit, that, although the tactics were easily learned, yet, in dealing with all other practical details of army-life, he was obliged to gain his knowledge through many blunders. There were a thousand points on which the light of Nature, even aided by "Army Regulations," did not sufficiently instruct him; and his best hints were probably obtained by frankly consulting regular officers, even if inferior in rank. The advantage of a West-Point training is precisely that of any other professional education. There is nothing in it which any intelligent man cannot learn for himself in later life; nevertheless, the intelligent man would have fared a good deal better, had he learned it all in advance. Test it by shifting the positions. No lawyer would trust his case to a West-Point graduate, without evidence of thorough special preparation. Yet he himself enters on a career equally new to him, where his clients may be counted by thousands, and every case is capital. The army is a foreign country to civilians; of course you can learn the language after your arrival, but how you envy your companion, who, having spoken it from childhood, can proceed at once to matters more important!

Yet the great advantage of the regular army does not, after all, consist merely in any superiority of knowledge, or in the trained habit of command. Granting that patience and labor can readily supply these to the volunteer, the trouble remains, that even in labor and patience the regular officer is apt to have the advantage, by reason of a stronger stimulus. The difference is not merely in the start, but in the pace. No man can be often thrown into the society of regular officers, especially among the younger ones, without noticing a higher standard of professional earnestness than that found among average volunteers; and in this respect a West-Point training makes little or no difference. The reason of the superiority is obvious. To the volunteer, the service is still an episode; to the regular, a permanent career. No doubt, if a man is thoroughly conscientious, or thoroughly ambitious, or thoroughly enthusiastic, a temporary pursuit may prove as absorbing as if it were taken up for life; but the majority of men, however well-meaning, are not thorough at all. How often one hears the apology made by volunteer officers, even those of high rank,—"Military life is not my profession; I entered the army from patriotism, willing to serve my country faithfully for three years, but of course not pretending to perfection in every trivial detail of a pursuit which I shall soon quit forever." But it is patriotism to think the details not trivial. If one gives one's self to one's country, let the gift be total and noble. These details are worthy to absorb the whole daily thought, and they should absorb it, until more thorough comprehension and more matured executive power leave room for larger studies, still in the line of the adopted occupation. If a man leaves his office or his study to be a soldier, let him be a soldier in earnest. Let those three years bound the horizon of his plans, and let him study his new duty as if earth offered no other conceivable career. The scholar must forswear his pen, the lawyer his books, the politician his arts. An officer of whatever rank, who does not find occupation enough for every day, amid the quietest winter-quarters, in the prescribed duties of his position and the studies to which they should lead, is fitted only for civil pursuits, and had better return to them.

Without this thoroughness, life in the army affords no solid contentment. What is called military glory is a fitful and uncertain thing. Time and the newspapers play strange tricks with reputations, and of a hundred officers whose names appear with honor in this morning's despatches ninety may never be mentioned again till it is time to write their epitaphs. Who, for instance, can recite the names of the successive cavalry-commanders who have ridden on their bold forays through Virginia, since the war began? All must give place to the latest Kautz or Sheridan, who has eclipsed without excelling them all. Yet each is as brave and as faithful to-day, no doubt, as when he too glittered for his hour before all men's gaze, and the obscurer duty may be the more substantial honor. So when I lift my eyes to look on yonder level ocean-floor, the fitful sunshine now glimmers white on one far-off sail, now on another; and yet I know that all canvas looks snowy while those casual rays are on it, and that the best vessel is that which, sunlit or shaded, best accomplishes its destined course. The officer is almost as powerless as the soldier to choose his opportunity or his place. Military glory may depend on a thousand things,—the accident of local position, the jealousy of a rival, the whim of a superior. But the merit of having done one's whole duty to the men whose lives are in one's keeping, and to the nation whose life is staked with theirs,—of having held one's command in such a state, that, if at any given moment it was not performing the most brilliant achievement, it might have been,—this is the substantial triumph which every faithful officer has always within reach.

Now will any one but a newspaper flatterer venture to say that this is the habitual standard in our volunteer service? Take as a test the manner in which official inspections are usually regarded by a regimental commander. These occasions are to him what examinations by the School Committee are to a public-school teacher. He may either deprecate and dodge them, or he may manfully welcome them as the very best means of improvement for all under his care. Which is the more common view? What sight more pitiable than to behold an officer begging off from inspection because he has just come in from picket, or is just going out on picket, or has just removed camp, or was a day too late with his last requisition for cartridges? No doubt it is a trying ordeal to have some young regular-army lieutenant ride up to your tent at an hour's notice, and leisurely devote a day to probing every weak spot in your command,—to stand by while he smells at every camp-kettle, detects every delinquent gun-sling, ferrets out old shoes from behind the mess-bunks, spies out every tent-pole not labelled with the sergeant's name, asks to see the cash-balance of each company-fund, and perplexes your best captain on forming from two ranks into one by the left flank. Yet it is just such unpleasant processes as these which are the salvation of an army; these petty mortifications are the fulcrum by which you can lift your whole regiment to a first-class rank, if you have only the sense to use them. So long as no inspecting officer needs twice to remind you of the same thing, you have no need to blush. But though you be the bravest of the brave, though you know a thousand things of which he is utterly ignorant, yet so long as he can tell you one thing which you ought to know, he is master of the situation. He may be the most conceited little popinjay who ever strutted in uniform; no matter; it is more for your interest to learn than for his to teach. Let our volunteer officers, as a body, once resolve to act on this principle, and we shall have such an army as the world never saw. But nothing costs the nation a price so fearful, in money or in men, as the false pride which shrinks from these necessary surgical operations, or regards the surgeon as a foe.