Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

In short, the selection of military officers by the elective method is a monstrosity, an utter reversal of the essential spirit of military appointment and promotion. It ought to be enough to immortalize it as such that, about the time of or soon after the original enlistments, the men of one of the Virginia regiments, in the exercise of their volunteer right to choose their officers, protested successfully against the assignment of General, then Colonel, Jackson to command them.

It is fair also to add that the result, in the case of our own company — as I have abundantly shown an exceptionally intelligent corps,--so far as the newly-elected captain was concerned, could not have been more satisfactory, as he was a man of the noblest nature and every inch a soldier. But this was not by any means the case with all the officers elected by us. Our two preceding captains were promoted, the one to be colonel commanding “Camp Lee” --the camp of instruction at Richmond-and the other, at a later date, to be surgeon of that post, with rank of major.

We seemed to be in no sort of hurry to get at McClellan; that is, we took our time on the road, feeling sure, from past experience, that he would take his. Our army and people invariably regarded that general as “an officer and a gentleman” and a fine soldier, too, except that he was a little slow and prone to see double as to the number of his foes. The Richmond Examiner, by far the most vigorous journal published in the South during the war, epitomized “little Mac” in the following graphic sentence, “Accustomed in peace to the indecent haste of railroad travel, McClellan adopted in war the sedate tactics of the mud turtle.” He certainly did seem to have a penchant for mud, Peninsula mud, Chickahominy mud, James River mud-any sort of mud; but he was too much of a gentleman to “sling” any of it, even at us “rebels.”

The only point of the march down at which we were made to hurry was the only one at which we would have demurred to doing so if it would have done any good, and that was Richmond, where, as I remember, we arrived about the 10th of April, and left by steamer down James River a day