school who encouraged the idea made us in our turn pay dearly for our folly in after years, as at Bladensburg and along the Niagara frontier in 1812.  The Revolutionary war proved that hastily gathered militia, justly angered and strung to high purpose, could sometimes whip regulars, a feat then deemed impossible; but it lacked very much of proving that they would usually do this.  Moreover, even the stalwart fighters who followed Clark and Sevier, and who did most important and valorous service, cannot point to any one such desperate deed of fierce courage as that of the doomed Texans under Bowie and Davy Crockett in the Alamo.

A very slight comparison of the losses suffered in the battles of the Revolution with those suffered in the battles of the Civil War is sufficient to show the superiority of the soldiers who fought in the latter (and a comparison of the tactics and other features of the conflicts will make the fact even clearer).  No Revolutionary regiment or brigade suffered such a loss as befell the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg, where it lost 215 out of 263 men, 82 per cent.; the 9th Illinois at Shiloh, where it lost 366 out of 578 men, 63 per cent.; the 1st Maine at Petersburg, which lost 632 out of 950 men, 67 per cent.; or Caldwell’s brigade of New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania troops, which, in Hancock’s attack at Fredericksburg, lost 949 out of 1,947 men, 48 per cent.; or, turning to the Southern soldiers, such a loss as that of the 1st Texas at Antietam, when 186 out of 226 men fell, 82 per cent.; or of the 26th North Carolina, which, at Gettysburg, lost 588 out of 820 men, 72 per cent.; or the 8th Tennessee, at Murfreesboro, which lost 306 out of 444 men, or 68 per cent.; or Garnett’s brigade of Virginians, which, in Pickett’s charge, lost 941 men out of 1,427, or 65 per cent.

There were over a hundred regiments, and not a few brigades, in the Union and Confederate armies, each of which in some one action suffered losses averaging as heavy as the above.  The Revolutionary armies cannot show such a roll of honor as this.  Still, it is hardly fair to judge them by this comparison, for the Civil War saw the most bloody and desperate fighting that has occurred of late years.  None of the European contests since the close of the Napoleonic struggles can be compared to it.  Thus the Light Brigade at Balaclava lost only 37 per cent., or 247 men out of 673, while the Guards at Inkermann lost but 45 per cent., or 594 out of 1,331; and the heaviest German losses in the Franco-Prussian war were but 49 and 46 per cent., occurring respectively to the Third Westphalian Regiment at Mars-le-Tours, and the Garde-Schutzen battalion at Metz.

These figures are taken from “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War,” by Col.  Wm. F. Fox, Albany, 1881; the loss in each instance includes few or no prisoners, save in the cases of Garnett’s brigade and of the Third Westphalian Regiment.

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