They included representatives from all nationalities, and their descendants, but the English and Irish elements predominated.  They had an argot peculiar to themselves.  It was partly made up of the “flash” language of the London thieves, amplified and enriched by the cant vocabulary and the jargon of crime of every European tongue.  They spoke it with a peculiar accent and intonation that made them instantly recognizable from the roughs of all other Cities.  They called themselves “N’Yaarkers;” we came to know them as “Raiders.”

If everything in the animal world has its counterpart among men, then these were the wolves, jackals and hyenas of the race at once cowardly and fierce—­audaciously bold when the power of numbers was on their side, and cowardly when confronted with resolution by anything like an equality of strength.

Like all other roughs and rascals of whatever degree, they were utterly worthless as soldiers.  There may have been in the Army some habitual corner loafer, some fistic champion of the bar-room and brothel, some Terror of Plug Uglyville, who was worth the salt in the hard tack he consumed, but if there were, I did not form his acquaintance, and I never heard of any one else who did.  It was the rule that the man who was the readiest in the use of fist and slungshot at home had the greatest diffidence about forming a close acquaintance with cold lead in the neighborhood of the front.  Thousands of the so-called “dangerous classes” were recruited, from whom the Government did not receive so much service as would pay for the buttons on their uniforms.  People expected that they would make themselves as troublesome to the Rebels as they were to good citizens and the Police, but they were only pugnacious to the provost guard, and terrible to the people in the rear of the Army who had anything that could be stolen.

The highest type of soldier which the world has yet produced is the intelligent, self-respecting American boy, with home, and father and mother and friends behind him, and duty in front beckoning him on.  In the sixty centuries that war has been a profession no man has entered its ranks so calmly resolute in confronting danger, so shrewd and energetic in his aggressiveness, so tenacious of the defense and the assault, so certain to rise swiftly to the level of every emergency, as the boy who, in the good old phrase, had been “well-raised” in a Godfearing home, and went to the field in obedience to a conviction of duty.  His unfailing courage and good sense won fights that the incompetency or cankering jealousy of commanders had lost.  High officers were occasionally disloyal, or willing to sacrifice their country to personal pique; still more frequently they were ignorant and inefficient; but the enlisted man had more than enough innate soldiership to make amends for these deficiencies, and his superb conduct often brought honors and promotions to those only who deserved shame and disaster.