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[26] who, by their zeal and intelligence, supplied the want of a general staff. It was only, therefore, in 1861, when it was no longer a question of handling twenty thousand regular troops, but one hundred thousand volunteers, that all the inconveniences arising from the absence of such an important machinery were sensibly felt. The functions of the general staff were divided among different corps. Officers detached from their regiments, and volunteers invested with temporary rank, performed the duties of aides-decamp to the generals under the name of personal aides. All the topographical, geodetical, and hydrographical works were entrusted to the corps of topographical engineers, to whom we are indebted for the handsome publications of the Coast Survey, and who, in 1862, were merged into the engineer corps, just as our geographical engineers were formerly merged into the general staff. The other functions of the latter corps, particularly those concerning the personnel of armies in the field, were entrusted to special officers of administration. Any details regarding the administration of military affairs, although greatly abridged, may appear long and tedious. Still they are necessary; for we must know the interior mechanism of an army in order fully to understand its movements, and its organization is a, mirror wherein its spirit is reflected. That of the regular army, like one of those diminutive models every part of which is equally enlarged and amplified by some ingenious process, was exactly copied at the time when the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, whose campaigns we shall have to narrate, were mustered into service. In this narrative we shall have to use technical English terms in order to designate military functions, the exact equivalents of which do not exist among us, and the precise meaning of which it is, therefore, necessary that we should establish. The administration of the American war department is divided into two technical parts. On one hand the body of troops, cavalry, artillery, and infantry, divided into regiments, depend, without intermedium, on the department bureaus, having neither distinctive chief nor separate management; on the other hand, there are corps composed exclusively of officers, each of them
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
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