“The army of that day,” he said,[228] “including its general staff, the three old and the nine new regiments, presented no pleasing aspect. The old officers had very generally sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.... Many of the appointments were positively bad, and a majority of the remainder indifferent. Party spirit of that day knew no bounds, and of course was blind to policy. Federalists were almost entirely excluded from selection, though great numbers were eager for the field, and in New England and some other States there were but very few educated Republicans; hence the selections from those communities consisted mostly of coarse and ignorant men. In the other States, where there was no lack of educated men in the dominant party, the appointments consisted generally of swaggerers, dependants, decayed gentlemen, and others, ‘fit for nothing else,’ which always turned out utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.” This account of the army of 1808 applied equally, said Scott, to the appointments of 1812. Perhaps the country would have fared as well without a regular army, by depending wholly on volunteers, and allowing the States to choose general officers. In such a case Andrew Jackson would have taken the place of James Winchester, and William Hull would never have received an appointment from Massachusetts. No one in the government gave much thought to the military dangers created by the war, yet these dangers seemed evident enough to warrant keen anxiety. The sea-shore was nowhere capable of defence; the Lakes were unguarded; the Indians of the Northwestern Territory were already in arms, and known to be waiting only a word from the Canadian governor-general; while the whole country beyond the Wabash and Maumee rivers stood nearly defenceless. At Detroit one hundred and twenty soldiers garrisoned the old British fort; eighty-five men on the Maumee held Fort Wayne; some fifty men guarded the new stockade called Fort Harrison, lately built on the Wabash; and fifty-three men, beyond possibility of rescue, were stationed at Fort Dearborn, or Chicago; finally, eighty-eight men occupied the Island of Michillimackinaw in the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. These were all the military defences of a vast territory, which once lost would need another war to regain; and these petty garrisons, with the settlers about them, were certain, in the event of an ordinary mischance, to be scalped as well as captured. The situation was little better in the South and Southwest, where the Indians needed only the support of a British army at New Orleans or Mobile to expel every American garrison from the territory.