Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[31] essentially their work; they were in a majority in the army of General Scott, who made the decisive campaign; the volunteers were only their auxiliaries; and even where the latter happened to be more numerous than the former, the regular officers retained, nevertheless, the exclusive control of all operations.

Those volunteers did not much resemble the class in the same service who, in 1861, truly represented the nation in arms, for no enthusiasm had stimulated their enlistment. The war which was undertaken against Mexico was iniquitous. The men of the South who then governed the Union, President Polk and his agent Mr. Slidell—the same we have subsequently seen in Europe pleading in behalf of the Confederate cause in the name of the right of nationalities—alarmed at the increasing influence of the free States, had sought to counterbalance it in the councils of the republic by the creation of new slave States. To accomplish this it was deemed necessary to dismember Mexico and to introduce slavery into the territories that would be taken from her. It was for the purpose of carrying out this political scheme that war was declared, just as at other periods filibusters were encouraged to carry trouble into Cuba or into Central America. The North repudiated this odious policy; consequently, it was only represented by a contingent of less than twenty thousand volunteers, and even the majority of these only entered the service to sustain the national honor, when Scott, detained at Puebla for want of troops, found himself seriously compromised. About forty thousand volunteers from the South, a force which was then considered very large, were successively mustered into service: the hope of extending the domain of slavery had fired their ardor. Among those most in earnest might already be noticed Colonel Jefferson Davis at the head of a regiment of Mississippi volunteers. Ambitious, impetuous, and eloquent, this old West Pointer was trying to achieve at the same time popularity with his party, and the military reputation which, when the crisis came, was to place him in possession of the War Department. He accomplished that double object; and at a later period, when the great rebellion, of which he was the soul, broke out, he received the honors of the first Confederate successes; but when defeat followed, his former accomplices accused him of having accelerated