under the President, but independent potentates acting usually in as much detachment from him as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge from the Board of Education or a Presbyterian minister from a bishop.  This group of men, for the most part able, patriotic, and determined, were there to be used and had to be consulted.  It follows that the policy of the North in raising and organising its armies had at first to be a policy evolved between numerous independent authorities which never met and were held together by a somewhat ignorant public opinion, sometimes much depressed and sometimes, which was worse, oversanguine.  It is impossible to judge exactly how ill or how well Lincoln, under such circumstances, grappled with this particular problem, but many anomalies which seem to us preposterous—­the raising of raw new regiments when fine seasoned regiments were short of half their strength, and so forth—­were in these circumstances inevitable.  The national system of recruiting, backed by compulsion, which was later set up, still required for its success the co-operation of State and local authorities of this wholly independent character.

Northern and Southern armies alike had necessarily to be commanded to a great extent by amateur officers; the number of officers, in the service or retired, who had been trained at West Point, was immeasurably too small for the needs of the armies.  Amateurs had to be called in, and not only so, but they had in some cases to be given very important commands.  The not altogether unwholesome tradition that a self-reliant man can turn his hand to anything was of course very strong in America, and the short military annals of the country had been thought to have added some illustrious instances to the roll of men of peace who have distinguished themselves in arms.  So a political leader, no matter whether he was Democrat or Republican, who was a man of known general capacity, would sometimes at first seem suitable for an important command rather than the trained but unknown professional soldier who was the alternative.  Moreover, it seemed foolish not to appoint him, when, as sometimes happened, he could bring thousands of recruits from his State.  The Civil War turned out, however, to show the superiority of the duly trained military mind in a marked degree.  Some West-Pointers of repute of course proved incapable, and a great many amateur colonels and generals, both North and South, attained a very fair level of competence in the service (the few conspicuous failures seem to have been quite exceptional); but, all the same, of the many clever and stirring men who then took up soldiering as novices and served for four years, not one achieved brilliant success; of the generals in the war whose names are remembered, some had indeed passed years in civil life, but every one had received a thorough military training in the years of his early manhood.  It certainly does not appear that the Administration was really neglectful of professional