THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
mistake in leaving the West. The very prestige he had won in the West exposed him to peculiar troubles and dangers in the East. There is no less professional jealousy among military men than there is among musicians or actors. This is human nature. That the officers of the regular army, the West-Pointers, when they saw so many civilian volunteers appointed to high grades and commands, should have been stirred to a grudging discontents and that they should have clubbed together for the protection or advancement of the pretentions or claims of their class, may sometimes have been deplorably injurious to the public interest, but it was not surprising. On the whole, it must be admitted that, while the war developed not a few volunteer officers of great merit, the class of professional soldiers who had graduated at our great military school furnished by far the largest number and the most efficient of the superior commanders in the field. It was the same in the Confederate army. At the West there were comparatively few West-Pointers to take the larger commands. The volunteer element was overwhelmingly predominant, and the relations between the two classes of officers naturally assumed a more democratic character. At the East the number of West-Pointers in our army was much larger and their “esprit de corps” more pronounced and exclusive. They would tolerate with good grace the appointment to high grades or the promotion of civilian volunteers who were men of local importance or who had distinguished themselves. But when a volunteer general, and a “foreigner,” too, was transferred from the West to the East as a man of superior qualities and military competency, who might perhaps teach them something, it went much against their grain, and that man was often looked upon as a pretentious intruder and obliged to encounter very watchful and sometimes even rancorous criticism.
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