240
��The Northern Volunteers.
��would gaze forth from a line of bat- tle over fifty miles long.
The volunteers came from all class- es in civil life. It will be an impres- sive chapter in history which recounts how army after army was summoned to the field as the war went on. until half the able-bodied men of the North were under arms. How, at each call, the farmer left the plough in the fur- row, the harvest ungathered, the me- chanic dropped his tools, the teacher quit his desk, the student his book, and by the hundred thousand hurried to the field to battle for the Union. Those in the ranks were mainly young men. Their average age was from twenty-four to twenty-five years. But this average does not tell the story of the youth. There wei'e many thousands between seventeen and twenty-one who bore their full share of the brunt of war. It would startle the fathers and mothers of to-day to hear it suggested that, in the event of war, their l)oys yet in the schools might become soldiers: Init there was many a lad in '61 vvlio left his books at seventeen to follow the drum, and matured into early manhood in the rapid and momentous experiences of campaigns and battles.
Two thirds of our army were native Americans. They outnnm])ered the foreign born in [iroportion to the whole number fit for military service in the North. The high personal character of the volunteers is marked by the few desertions from their ranks. In the regular army there were two hundred and forty-four de- sertions to the thousand during the war. There were less than sixty- three to the thousand from the volun- teer organizations, and these were
��not nearly all chargeable to the vol- unteers, for very many of the de- serters were substitutes — a set of men who enlisted for money alone, and who had no love of country'. The volunteers enlisted from patriot- ism. Neither poverty, the allure- ments of high pay, the love of glory, nor a spirit of unrest, could have led more than half the able-bodied men of the North to volunteer for war.
The reflection may occui' to some, as it sometimes did to those of us in the field who enlisted early in the war. that the men who did not volun- teer until they secured great bounties were somewhat mercenary in their motives. But when we consider that a large part, perhai)S the most of these men, had to leave dependants at home, and that if they survived they risked not only death on the battlefield, but the impaii'ment of health and vigor for life from wounds and exposure, we cannot say that they did themselves and their fami- lies more than scant justice to wait for a bounty which, in extreme cases, did not exceed what they would have earned at their trades in three or four vears. There is manv a veteran to- day who endures the pangs of old wounds that will never cease, or bat- tles against the malaria which has not left him for twenty years, who realizes that he gave to his country what money could not pa\' for.
A striking difference between our volunteer army and the other great armies of the world was, that in it there was no class distinction be- tween those who were officers and those who were in the ranks. The reader of military history will find that in " the accounts of battles in
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