[97] for themselves, they took the Federal Constitution, and altered the sense, without modifying its form. They selected for their new flag that which most resembled the banner of 1776. Finally, in their efforts to raise volunteers, and to organize the interior mechanism of their armies, they scrupulously preserved and applied the system which had prevailed before secession, and which we shall see put into practice by the North on a very large scale. They pursued this course so far as to organize a corps of regular troops, independent of the authority of so-called sovereign States, and they copied the old army of the United States so exactly that they limited its strength to the insignificant figure of ten thousand men. But this army, unable to compensate for its numerical weakness either by its traditions or the elements that composed it, was not in any way distinguished from the other Confederate troops, and had no special part to play in the war.
Never, perhaps, since the time of Caesar, could the sad words of Lucan have been applied with so much truth to any civil war as to this one:
Pares aquilas et pila minantia pilis.
This war, however, developed important differences of character between men composing armies so similar in their organizations. Those of the South became good soldiers more rapidly than those of the North. They were more accustomed to follow leaders; their life was rougher than that of the Eastern farmers, and more adventurous than that of the Western pioneers. Inured to privations, they were satisfied with rations which the Federal soldier looked upon as insufficient. Hence that rapidity of movement which was one of the principal causes of all their successes. Rarely paid by the government, which, unable to solve its financial difficulties, fairly ignored their claims, they never asked for the depreciated paper which was due to them, except when they thought their officers better treated than themselves, and then it was sufficient to lead them against the foe to pacify them. Nearly all of them were practiced in the use of fireams, and one might see them enter the recruiting-offices with the rifle on their shoulders and the revolver at the belt—weapons which they never laid aside, and without which they would not have considered themselves
