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

---

[187] wholesome rivalry between the States, enabled the army to acquire a much more rapid organization than it would have done if the Federal government had undertaken this formation alone. In those critical moments when a nation's life depends, not upon the perfection of the means employed for saving her, but upon their prompt application, people accustomed to leave individual action entirely unfettered well know how to turn all their resources to immediate account, whereas a centralized administration, accustomed to do everything itself, has but too often to struggle in hopeless incapacity.

The Federal government, therefore, was required by law to arm and equip the volunteers; but as it stood in need of everything at the very moment when all had to be created at once—as its arsenals, which would have been insufficient for the emergency even if well supplied, had been plundered by the instigators of rebellion, and could not even furnish a musket, a coat, or a pair of shoes for the improvised defenders of the country—most of the States themselves undertook to furnish those outfits for troops which they raised. The small State of Rhode Island, whose speciality has always been the manufacture of ordnance, sent to Washington several batteries provided with horses, and all the necessary accoutrements for taking the field at once.

The day when a new regiment was delivered over to the Federal authority and took the oath of allegiance to the Union, that authority took it under pay, and assumed the responsibility of providing for its maintenance; each soldier received an entrance bounty, and the promise of a land-grant on the day of his discharge. This promise secured to him a fixed and certain remuneration at the close of his term of service; for if his bounty, paid in paper money, decreased in value in consequence of the depreciation of the currency, the nominal price of the land, having increased in like proportion, enabled him to gain on one hand what he lost on the other. The depreciation of paper money, however, weighed but lightly upon the volunteer, even during his term of service, for from 1861 to 1865 his pay was gradually raised from eleven to sixteen dollars per month, and the value of bounties given by the Federal government was increased in like manner. Here again the independent initiative already referred