At the organization of the Confederate Government, his individual taste, capacity and experience, were fortunately coincident with the necessities of the situation in urging upon President Davis a thorough and efficient military establishment upon a war footing. The necessity of thorough preparation for war with the United States was never lost sight of by him. Whatever his efforts to avert that calamity, its probabilities were too menacing not to challenge unremitting precautions. In the War Department and military legislation of the Confederacy was felt the infusion of his energy and system, and were realized the fruits of his labors. There can be no more splendid monument of his genius than that superb specimen of scientific mechanism, the army of the Confederate States. Its nucleus was prepared in those few weeks' respite from actual war, passed by the Confederate Government, at Montgomery; and the framework then established was subsequently enlarged upon, until it was developed into a model of military anatomy--of complex, yet harmonious organism--seldom rivaled and never surpassed in the history of war. Whatever may be said of defective features exhibited in the Confederate military organization, in the numerous and varied campaigns of the war, those defects are not to be attributed to the original system. Whatever may be alleged against its lax discipline--that morbid influence which so fearfully enervated its efficiency, neutralized valor and strategy, and made the war a series of magnificent but valueless successes, the shadow without the substance of victory--the fault was in the execution, not in the original conception. However admirably tempered the blade, that must be a skillful hand which would efficiently wield it. A graduate of West Point and a practical as well as theoretical soldier, President Davis naturally and, as the war demonstrated, wisely inclined in his military administration to those theories which regard war as a science difficult and laborious of mastery. His marked and judicious partiality for _educated soldiers_ was often the ground of censorious comment during the war, but this will hardly be adjudged a fault now. "West Point" was amply vindicated by the experience of both armies, against the sneers of those who affected such extreme admiration for the "native genius" of citizen-soldiers. With a few notable exceptions in the Confederate army (and here is to be considered the peculiar genius for war of the South), and scarcely one worth mention in the armies of the North, the achievements of educated officers, and those of officers from civil life, are so utterly disproportionate as to forbid comparison.