The sixteen thousand three hundred and sixty-seven…
April 1861 CE
Approximately twenty percent of these officers, most of them Southerners, resign (willfully abandoning their legal commitments and responsibilities as officers in the military of the United States, to which each and every one of them have sworn an oath), choosing to tie their lives and fortunes to the Confederacy; the formation of the Confederate States Army is a matter initially undertaken by the individual states. (The decentralized nature of the Confederate defenses, encouraged by the states' distrust of a strong central government, will be one of the disadvantages suffered by the South during the war.)
In addition, almost two hundred West Point graduates who had previously left the Army, including Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Braxton Bragg, return to service at the outbreak of the war.
This group's loyalties are far more sharply divided, with ninety-two donning Confederate gray and one hundred and two putting on the blue of the Union Army.
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