APPENDIX. 103 having solidified the southern army by his judicious appointments of officers. In point of fact the nomination of the line fficers of the southern volunteer forces which still constitute the great bulk of the southern army is not, and never has been in the hands of Mr. Davis. These officers are elected by their men ; and it was a fact notorious in Richmond at the time of the battle of Fair Oaks that the chaotic condition into which the southern army fell, during that fight and particularly after the fall of General Johnston, was mainly attributable to the fact that in re-organizing the army in April and May, a vast proportion of the best officers of the line had been thrown out of commission in favor of others who had courted popularity by arts un-military, and who were wholly incompetent to the management of their troops. “ Hierarchy and discipline ” are things of very recent growth in the southern army. I have heard it stated, upon respectable authority Virginia, that at the battle of Bull Run, in July, 1861, whole battalions of southern troops deliberately marched out of the fight, precisely as the author describes some of Fitz- John Porter’s regiments to have done at the battle of Gaines’s Mills. Mr. Davis attempted, indeed, very early in the war to assume a general authority over the troops of the States. But he was met at the outset by the State authorities. At the head-quarters of General Johnston, to which I made a short visit in June, 1861, I saw for myself the difficulties thrown in the way of the confederate commanders, by the impossibility of their doing precisely what the author commends them for doing. In Georgia, the issue between the confederate and state organizations was made very early and very decisively by Governor Brown. Colonel Bartow, (afterwards killed at Bull Run,) having received a confederate commission and raised a regiment of men, applied to the state for arms. These the Governor refused to supply, declaring that Georgia
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