Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy during the war of 1861-1865, vol. 1: prelminary narrative

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[146] too free-and-easy familiarity between officers and men, diminished as the war went on; and all learned by experience the absolute need of military subordination, whatever the relative position of the parties at home.¹

It is probable that, in a war so prolonged and desperate, the defects incident to volunteer soldiers were much more than counterbalanced by the personal intelligence and endurance of that class. Maj. G. C. Eggleston, a Confederate officer, has borne remarkable testimony to this in a paper in the Century War Book. He says of Lee's army: ‘With mercenary troops or regulars the resistance that Lee was able to offer to Grant's tremendous pressure would have been impossible.... The starvation and the excessive marching would have destroyed the morale of troops held together only by discipline.... If either side had lacked this element of personal heroism on the part of its men, it would have been driven from the field long before the spring of 1865.’² It is the recognition of this fact on each side which has rendered possible the mutual good feeling that has since arisen between the veterans of the two armies, and which has nowhere been more marked than in Massachusetts. After a sufficient number of years have passed, it is impossible not to recognize with a certain appreciation the fighting qualities of either a victorious or a defeated foe. The same fairness extends in time to the mutual criticism of leadership. The latest Northern writers, as Ropes and Dodge, both Massachusetts men, have sometimes been criticised as being too complimentary to Lee as compared with Grant; and Walker, also a Massachusetts man, and a very high authority, has not hesitated to bear witness to ‘that restless activity, unflinching audacity and spontaneous enterprise by which the Confederate commanders were so strongly marked, but in which many of the most resolute and stubborn fighters in our own army seemed lacking.’³ Even he would doubtless recognize, however, that, after the organization of Sheridan's cavalry, this comparison lost some of its weight. Certainly the soldiers of each army thoroughly outgrew the delusion with which each began, that the other army would be easy to conquer. ‘Do ’