“Let officers and men be made to feel that they will most effectually secure their safety by remaining steadily at their posts, preserving order, and fighting with coolness and vigour...Impress upon the officers that discipline cannot be attained without constant watchfulness on their part.  They must attend to the smallest particulars of detail.  Men must be habituated to obey or they cannot be controlled in battle, and the neglect of the least important order impairs the proper influence of the officer."* (* Memoirs of General Robert E. Lee.  By A. L. Long, Military Secretary and Brigadier-General pages 685-6.)

That such a circular was considered necessary after the troops had been nearly four years under arms establishes beyond all question that the discipline of the Confederate army was not that of the regular troops with whom General Lee had served under the Stars and Stripes; but it is not to be understood that he attributed the deficiencies of his soldiers to any spirit of resistance on their part to the demands of subordination.  Elsewhere he says:  “The greatest difficulty I find is in causing orders and regulations to be obeyed.  This arises not from a spirit of disobedience, but from ignorance."* (* Memoirs, etc. page 619.  Letter dated March 21, 1863.) And here, with his usual perspicacity, he goes straight to the root of the evil.  When the men in the ranks understand all that discipline involves, safety, health, efficiency, victory, it is easily maintained; and it is because experience and tradition have taught them this that veteran armies are so amenable to control.  “Soldiers,” says Sir Charles Napier, “must obey in all things.  They may and do laugh at foolish orders, but they nevertheless obey, not because they are blindly obedient, but because they know that to disobey is to break the backbone of their profession.”

Such knowledge, however, is long in coming, even to the regular, and it may be questioned whether it ever really came home to the Confederates.

In fact, the Southern soldier, ignorant, at the outset, of what may be accomplished by discipline, never quite got rid of the belief that the enthusiasm of the individual, his goodwill and his native courage, was a more than sufficient substitute.  “The spirit which animates our soldiers,” wrote Lee, “and the natural courage with which they are so liberally endowed, have led to a reliance upon those good qualities, to the neglect of measures which would increase their efficiency and contribute to their safety."* (* Memoirs etc. page 684.  By A. L. Long.) Yet the soldier was hardly to blame.  Neither he nor his regimental officers had any previous knowledge of war when they were suddenly launched against the enemy, and there was no time to instil into them the habits of discipline.  There was no regular army to set them an example; no historic force whose traditions they would unconsciously have adopted; the exigencies of the service forbade the retention of the men in camps of instruction, and trained instructors could not be spared from more important duties.