Page images
PDF
EPUB

in their eyes, begged and pleaded for the preservation of the Union. In those days the Union was like a thing of glass, liable at any moment to be shattered. The Union has no begging advocates now. It does not need them. The Union army and Appomattox put an end to supplications in behalf of the Union. Where is the man to-day who would dare to lift his voice against. the American Union? But better far than that no man would dare so to lift his voice, is the fact of to-day that no man wishes. to do it.

On his death-bed General Grant wrote: "I have witnessed since my sickness just what I have wished to see ever since the war,— harmony and good feeling between the sections." The prophecy of Mr. Lincoln's first inaugural address is coming true: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land has swelled the chorus of the Union touched by the better angels of our nature.”

Too often in this world right means only might. Shall it be said of us that we won only because we had the power? No, it shall be written that right and might were both on our side. When our flag won, all mankind were the winners. The function of this republic is to show the world that intelligence keeps order in the social state better than force. Its function is to show the world that while for an individual to mind his own business is. common sense, for a nation to mind its own business is not only common sense but the only true statesmanship.

When this continent was discovered, the world was full of history. Multitudes of nations had come and gone. But the world. waited for this nation to see the only George Washington, and the only Abraham Lincoln. And as Washington and Lincoln. for manhood and character stand high above all other public men the world has produced, so shall the people of this land by their intelligence, efficiency and character stand high above the people: of all other lands. Our flag means the righting of every wrong.. It means the elevation of mankind. It means ultimately a nation without an ignorant man and without a pauper. Our flag means that this nation shall blaze the way for the whole brotherhood of man, white and black, red and yellow, toward that better condition of mankind, whereof in their raptures poets have dreamed, for which in their agonies saints have prayed, and for which upon

the world's battle-field patriots have fought and bled and died. The first necessity in war is able leadership. "In war," said Napoleon, "men are nothing; a man is everything." In the beginning of our war thousands upon thousands of soldiers were sacrificed in order to break in apprentice generals who did not know what to do with their men. Once upon a time, early in the war, Mr. Lincoln is reported to have said: "If General Soand-so does not want to use his army, I would like to borrow it." When we are ill we send for a physician; when we are sued we retain a lawyer; when we have any particular business to do we get, if possible, a man to do it who has been trained for the business. I believe in educating at the Military Academy ten times as many officers as we do now. When educated, I would organize them into companies and battalions as a corps d'elite to take the place of our present army. Let them take their turns periodically, till the age of thirty or thirty-five, to be officers and soldiers, let them be paid all the time as officers are paid now, and even better; let us pay to 5,000 of them all that we now pay to the whole army of 25,000 men; let an officer have experience in serving in all grades and in all arms; let promotion be rapid; let us have no more lieutenants and captains forty and fifty years old, wishing that they had never been born; let no officer remain in the same grade longer than three years, so that the second lieutenant of twenty-one shall be a full colonel at thirty-nine, and a brigadier-general at forty-two, and have the experience of all the grades.

“Teach the boy to do that which he will be called upon to do when he becomes a man," said the old Greek. In like manner, in time of peace teach a soldier, so far as may be, that which he will be called upon to do in time of war. In war he will be called upon to march with as little baggage as possible; to become familiar with mud and dust, hunger and thirst. In time of peace teach him to do it. Teach him on the march to cook, and to care for his health. Teach him to choose positions; teach him to throw up intrenchments. In time of peace, so far as it may be done, teach him war. Every man in the army should march from three to five hundred miles every year, and live in camp all the year round. The army should be kept in camp to be maneuvered together so that every officer would have experience in handling, not only a squad or a company, but a battalion, brigade and di

vision. In this manner, serving by rotation in all the grades,. every officer would get the experience of a general, and every general would have the experience of a common soldier. Think of it, that with all his experience in the Mexican war, even. General Grant in the beginning of our war took a regiment with many misgivings because he had never had command of so many men. And yet, what an advantage over all others those of our officers had who had been in the Mexican war, because they had at least been a part of an army and had seen things done with troops on a scale beyond the experience of a company post. What should hinder the army from being kept in camp? We have any number of places belonging to the Government suitable for camp, march and maneuver. Very soon the school-master will have charge of the Indians. There is scarcely a place or fortress belonging to the United States that could not be held in time of peace by a padlock and a watchman. Nearly the whole army could be brought together with perfect safety. Would such an army be too expensive? Of whatever is conducive to its safety this Nation can afford to have the best. The city of New York alone has a police force of three thousand men. The sergeants get $2,200 per year-nearly the pay of an army captain, and the privates get $1,200 a year—nearly as much as we pay our second lieutenants. If New York can maintain 3,000 such policemen, the Nation ean afford to maintain 5,000 men such as I propose.. Besides the expense would not be much greater than that of our present army. There would be no expense of recruiting and no expense from desertion. In such a corps, should war come, we should find well trained and experienced officers for a million of volunteers. Should any graduate prefer not to take his turn in the ranks he could leave the army while there was peace; and in time of peril he would find his way back again, and as many of our best offiers did during the war. But with a promotion every three years, the inducement to remain in the army would be vastly greater than it is now. Officers would feel that they were worthily occupied, doing necessary work, training for an emergency, promoted and paid like educated men engaged in. other pursuits. In time of peace the corps of 5,000 highly educated men would be a better emergency force than the more numerous army we now have. Its moral effect would be five to

one.

In such an army we should justly take a greater pride than

other nations do in their armies of millions of men. It would, indeed, be an army to be proud of. It would be a corps, the like of which does not exist on the earth, worthy of the foremost nation of the earth.

Even with ten times as many graduates of the Military Academy as we now have, we should not in time of war have too many generals fit to lead an army. The war produced only three generals on our side whom we all agree to place first and foremost. There were other good generals, but we all agree only upon General Grant and the two whom he valued next to himself. So varied a combination of talent does it take to make a successful general, that when the people first began to see one during the war they did not recognize the combination. When General Sherman said in 1861 that it would take 200,000 Union soldiers to go from Louisville to the Gulf, the hue and cry went up that he was crazy. When three years later, in command of the territory from Louisville to the Gulf, and in command of upwards of 300,000 men in that territory, after sweeping from Atlanta to the sea, he gave to the Nation as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, all the people said that for absolutely perfect common sense there was nobody in the world like the Grand Old Man of the Army of the Tennessee.

Fortunately for us the bad generalship was not all on our side. General Grant said that if he had had the ordering of the armies on both sides, he would have ordered Hood to do just what he did at Nashville. General Grant likewise said that on several occasions, by giving directions in military matters, Mr. Jefferson Davis rendered invaluable services to the Union cause. After the death of Stonewall Jackson, General Joseph E. Johnston ranked for ability in the Confederate army probably next to Lee. In Mississippi in 1863, as Pemberton's department commander and superior officer, General Johnston was in a country where every man was his friend and all the people our bitter enemies. General Johnston could have known, and should have known, all about the condition and whereabouts of General Grant's army. Yet on the 13th of May, the day before we entered Jackson, General Johnston wrote from there to General Pemberton: "I learn that Major-General Sherman is between us with four divisions at Clinton. If practical come up in his rear at once. To beat such a detachment would be of immense value." Fancy calling us a detachment !

Fancy coming up in the rear of the Army of the Tennessee when it was like a square against cavalry, all front, the most compact and least encumbered body of troops ever seen! What General Johnston called the detachment between himself and General Pemberton was the whole Army of the Tennessee, standing upon the ground as closely as soldiers can do to advantage, ready to turn in any direction, and fight, flushed with success, eager for victory. There was not only Sherman's detachment, there was McPherson's; there was McClernand's. There were Carr and Tuttle, Force and Leggett, Hovey and Crocker, Mower and J. E. Smith, Stevenson and A. J. Smith, Giles A. Smith and the gallant Boomer, Osterhous and Steele, Logan and Blair. Detachment indeed! Thirty-five thousand men whose like for marching and for battle could not be found on the earth, amphibious creatures who had demonstrated that they could live either in water or on land, but who preferred high and dry land; who had at last scrambled up out of the wet and were every day keeping the enemy on the keen run, always in battle or moving towards the sound of battle. There were the men of Henry and of Donelson, of Shiloh and Corinth, of Chickasaw Bayou, and of Arkansas Post. There were the men of Young's Point and of Miliken's Bend, of Deer Creek and Steel's Bayou, men small-pox and malaria proof, whom the broiling sun of Southern summer could not deprive of their appetite, upon whom the spring torrents had fallen without giving them the fever, upon whom the bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi had done their worst and had no effect; men whom bullets only could injure, a command fit for the very god of battle. And in the midst of them all, training himself for the Wilderness and Appomattox, guiding every footstep, smoking his cigar as if his life depended upon that alone, was he who has crossed before us. to the shores of eternity, the great silent soldier for whose immortal brow all our thoughts are garlands.

For illustration of the high type of men produced by the simple institutions under which we live, we need not go out of our own Army of the Tennessee. When Generel Sherman was at Smithland, Ky., in 1862, and General Grant in the field in Tennessee, General Sherman offered repeatedly to waive his rank, which was then superior to that of Grant, and go and serve under him in the field. Later on, after the fall of Corinth, when General Grant was. in disgrace with the great in-door general who had read all the

« EelmineJätka »