FLAT CONCLUSION OF THE WAR. 727 not amount to a battle. There was no last great convulsion, such as usually marks the final struggles of a people's devotion or the expiring hours of their desperation. The word "surrender" travelled from Virginia to Texas. A four years' contest terminated with the smallest incident of blood-shed; it lapsed; it passed by a rapid and easy transition into a profound and abject submission. There must be some explanation of this flat conclusion of the war. It is easily found. Such a condition could only take place in a thorough demoralization of the armies and people of the Confederacy; there must have been a general decay of public spirit, a general rottenness of public affairs when a great war was thus terminated, and a contest was abandoned so short of positive defeat, and so far from the historical necessity of subjugation. sources. There has been a very superficial, and, to some people, a very pleasant way of accounting for the downfall of the Southern Confederacy, by simply ascribing it to the great superiourity of the North in numbers and reThis argument has had a great career in the newspapers and in small publications; and the vulgar mind is easily imposed upon by the statistical parallel and the arithmetical statement, inclined as it is to limit. its comprehension of great historical problems to mere material views of the question. We shall give this argument the benefit of all it contains, and state it in its full force. Thus, it is correctly said that official reports in Washington show that there were called into the Federal service from the Northern States 2,656,553 men during the war, and that this number is quite one-third as many as all the white men, women, and children of the Southern States. Again, the figures in the War Department at Washington show that on the 1st of May, 1865, the military force of the North was 1,000,516 men of all arms; while the paroles taken in the Confederacy officially and conclusively show that the whole number of men within its limits under arms was exactly 174,223. Thus, it is said, putting the number 1,000,516 against 174,223, and taking into account the superiourity of the North in war materiel, there is sufficient reason for the failure of the Confederate cause without looking for another. This explanation of failure is of course agreeable to the Southern people. But the historical judgment rejects it, discovers the fallacy, and will not refuse to point it out. It is simply to be observed that the disparity of military force, as between North and South stated above, is not the natural one; and that the fact of only 174,223 Confederates being under arms in the last period of the war was the result of mal-administration, the defective execution of the conscription law, the decay of the volunteer spirit, the unpopularity of the war, and that these are the causes which lie beyond this arithmetical inequality, which, in fact, produced the greater part of it, and which must be held responsible in the explanation. The fallacy consists in taking the very results of Confederate mal-administration, and putting them in comparison against a full exhibition of Northern in the war. power The only just basis of comparison between the military forces of North and South is to be found in a careful parallel statement of the populations. This excludes all question of administration and political skill. Fortunately we have precise data for the estimate we propose. If we add to the Free States the four Slave States that followed their lead, under more or less compulsion, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, and to these the districts at Federal command from an early period of the war, say half of Tennessee and Louisiana and a third of Virginia, we have a population, by the census of 1860, of 23,485,722 on the Federal side. This leaves under the rule of the Confederacy 7,662,325. There is no doubt that this superiourity of the North in numbers had great weight; that it contributed much to the discomfiture of the Confederacy; that it must be taken largely into any explanation of the results of the war-but the great question, at last, remains, was this numerical inequality, of itself, sufficient to determine the war in favour of the North, considering the great compensation which the South had in superiour animation, in the circumstance of fighting on the defensive, and, above all, in the great extent of her territory. We fear that the lessons and examples of history are to the contrary, and we search in vain for one instance where a country of such extent as the Confederacy has been so thoroughly subdued by any amount of military force, unless where popular demoralization has supervened. If war was a contest on an open plain, where military forces fight a duel, of course that inferiour in numbers must go under. But war is an intricate game, and there are elements in it far more decisive than that of numbers. At the beginning of the war in America all intelligent men in the world and the Southern leaders themselves knew the disparity of population and consequently of military force as between the North and South; but they did not on that account determine that the defeat of the South was a foregone conclusion, and the argument comes with a bad grace from leaders of the Confederacy to ascribe now its failure to what stared them in the face at the commencement of the contest, and was then so lightly and even insolently dismissed from their calculation. The judgment of men who reflected, was that the South would be ultimately the victor, mainly because it was impossible to conquer space; that her subjection was a "geographical impossibility;" that three millions of men could not garrison her territory; that a country so vast and of such peculiar features-not open as the European countries, and traversed everywhere by practicable roads, but wild and difficult with river, mountain, and swamp, equivalent to successive lines of military fortifications, welted, as it were, with natural mounds and barriers-could never be brought un REFLECTIONS ON THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 729* der subjection to the military power of the North. And these views were severely just; they are true forever, now as formerly; but they proceeded on the supposition that the morale of the Confederacy would be preserved, and when the hypothesis fell (mainly through mal-administration in Richmond) the argument fell with it. There is but one conclusion that remains for the dispassionate student of history. Whatever may be the partial explanations of the downfall of the Southern Confederacy, and whatever may be the various excuses that passion and false pride, and flattery of demagogues, may offer, the great and melancholy fact remains that the Confederates, with an abler Government and more resolute spirit, might have accomplished their independence. This reflection irresistibly couples another. Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence. The Confederates have gone out of this war, with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, and that there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors. To deal with such a sentiment, to keep it whipped, to restrain it from a new experiment requires the highest efforts of intellect, the most delicate offices of magnanimity and kindness, and is the great task which the war has left to American statesmanship. Would it be strange, in a broad view of history, that the North, pursuing a policy contrary to what we have indicated, and venturing upon new exasperation and defiance, should realize that the South has abandoned the contest of the last four years, merely to resume it in a wider arena, and on a larger issue, and in a change of circumstances wherein may be asserted the profit of experience, and raised a new standard of Hope! * The lapse of twelve pages after 729 is accounted for by the omission to number the steel plate pages in their order. See list of Illustrations. CHAPTER XLIV. PROPER LIMIT OF THE NARRATIVE OF THE WAR.-A GLANCE AT ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES. THE SOUTH.-WHAT WOULD BE THE EXTREMITY OF HER HUMILIATION. THE record of the war closes exactly with the laying down of the Confederate arms. We do not design to transgress this limit of our narrative. But it will not be out of place to regard generally the political consequences of the war, so far as they have been developed in a formation of parties, involving the further destinies of the country, and in the light of whose actions will probably be read many future pages of American History. The surrender of Gen. Lee's army was not the simple act of a defeated and overpowered General; it was not the misfortune of an individual. The public mind the South was fully represented in that surrender. The people had become convinced that the Confederate cause was lost; they saw that the exertions of four years, misdirected and abused, had not availed, and they submitted to what they conceived now to be the determined fortune of the war. That war closed on a spectacle of ruin, the greatest of modern times. There were eleven great States lying prostrate; their capital all absorbed ; their fields desolate; their towns and cities ruined; their public works torn to pieces by armies; their system of labour overturned; the fruits of the toil of generations all swept into a chaos of destruction; their slave property taken away by a stroke of the pen; a pecuniary loss of two thousand millions of dollars involved in one single measure of spoliation-a penalty embraced in one edict, in magnitude such as had seldom been exacted unless in wars synonymous with robberies. As an evidence of the poverty of the South, produced by the war, we may cite the case of the State of South Carolina. By the census of 1860, the property of the State was value at $400,000,000. Of this, it has been estimated that the injury to the banks, private securities, railroads, cities, houses, plantations, stock, etc., amounted to $100,000,000. There were, by the same census, 400,000 slaves, valued at $200,000,000. This left only $100,000,000 for the value of all the property left in the State; and the principal portion of this consisted of lands, which had fallen in value immensely. The close of the war presented the Government at Washington with the alternative of two distinct and opposite policies, with reference to the subdued Southern States. One was the policy of the restoration of the Union with reconciliation: the other the policy of restriction. The party that favoured the latter was not long in developing the full extent of its doctrine, which involved universal confiscation at the South, a general execution of prominent men, the disfranchisement of men who acted or sympathized with the Confederates, and the granting of the right of voting to the freed blacks. This hideous programme was announced not only as a just punishment of "rebels," but as a security for the future, and the indispensable condition of the public peace. But to men who had read the lessons of history it was clearly apparent that this policy would be destructive of the very ends it proposed; that it would increase the acerbity of feeling at the South; that it would deliver the two races over to the most violent discord; and that it would be the occasion of immeasurable chaos and interminable anarchy. It was the immortal BURKE who uttered the great philosophical truth of history: that "liberty, and not despotism, was the cure of anarchy ;" and who proposed as the speedy and sovereign remedy for the disorders of the Col ɔnies, that they should be "admitted to a share in the British Con stitution." |