Recruitment in the British Army from families with a military tradition. (This contrasted with the Navy, whose officers were more often from a middle-class background.) The second son of King George III, Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, did much to improve the standard of officer recruitment from his position as Commander in Chief of the Army (from 1795 to 1809, then from 1811 to 1827). The sale of commissions, finally abolished in the Cardwell reforms in 1868–1874, and the further Childers Reforms. In spite of its abolition, the status of an officer being from a privileged background and that of another rank being
General officers in the Confederate States Army June 23, 1865, and the war's last surviving full general, Edmund Kirby Smith, died on March 28, 1893. James Longstreet died on January 2, 1904, and was considered "the last of the high command of the Confederacy". The Confederate Army's system of using four grades of general officers is currently the same rank structure used by the U.S. Army (in use since shortly after the Civil War), and is also the system used by the U.S. Marine Corps (in use since World War II). General officers in the Confederate States Army The general officers of the Confederate States Army (CSA)