Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[100] of Pennsylvania; there they could not avail themselves of the skill of their soldiers by deploying them as sharpshooters to cover their attacks against open positions defended by artillery. These soldiers, more practiced in the use of the rifle than those of the North, were well adapted for such service; they proved this during the sieges and those slow operations where the two armies, after having both fallen back into their respective entrenchments, reconnoitred each other in turn, and drew their lines closer by degrees without daring to charge each other openly. Posted behind breastworks, or in a rifle-pit, they would watch the Federal works with the cool vigilance of a hunter who has passed many days motionless by the side of some deserted lake, watching for the stag that is sure to come to quench his thirst at sunset; and it only required to place a hat on the point of a bayonet and raise it slowly above the Federal parapets to see all the bushes, which seemed to have been innocently planted in front of the enemy's line, enveloped in smoke, and that improvised target pierced by as many balls.

During the first campaigns, the habits and education of the Confederate soldiers gave to their cavalry a still more marked superiority over that of their adversaries. This superiority was wrongly attributed to the merit of the chiefs who commanded it; for if Ashby, Stuart, and all those brilliant officers who organized the cavalry of the South won at first the respect and admiration of their enemies, they found in front of them generals equally expert in the art of handling that arm of the military service: Sheridan, Stoneman, Kilpatrick, and many others demonstrated this as soon as they had good troops to command. The severe discipline which had been introduced into the Confederate army was the means of moulding those cavalrymen to the difficult task they had to accomplish; but their superiority was chiefly owing to the fact that they had been recruited at the outset among the better classes of the population—among those countrymen who, before the war, were in sufficiently easy circumstances to own a horse, and who, on enlisting, had brought it with them. Inured to bodily exercise, and having learned horsemanship in a country where the roads really accessible to carriages were scarce, they formed a class of mounted men already