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from the general to the humblest file-closer, but to CH. XVII. wait for the expected orders from the civil authori

ties for their disbandment.

The orders came as a mere matter of course, and were executed with a thoroughness and rapidity which then seemed also a matter of course, but which will appear more and more wonderful to succeeding generations. The muster-out began on the 29th of April, before Lincoln was borne to his grave, before Davis was caught, before the rebels of the trans-Mississippi had ceased uttering their boasts of eternal defiance. First the new recruits, next the veterans whose terms were nearly expired, next those expensive corps the cavalry and artillery, and so on in regular order. Sherman's laurelcrowned army was the first to complete its musterout, and the heroic Army of the Potomac was not. far behind it. These veterans of hundreds of battlefields were soon found mingled in all the pursuits of civic activity. By the 7th of August 641,000 troops had become citizens; by the middle of November over 800,000 had been mustered outwithout a fancy in any mind that there was anything else to do.

The Navy Department had not waited for the return of peace to begin the reduction of expenses. As soon as Fort Fisher fell the retrenchment began, and before Grant started on his last campaign considerable progress had been made in that direction. By the 1st of May the squadrons were reduced onehalf, and in July but thirty steamers comprised the entire blockading squadron on the Atlantic and the Gulf. The Potomac and Mississippi flotillas were wholly discontinued in another month. When Mr. VOL. X.-22

1865.

CH. XVII. Welles made his annual report, in December, he could say: "There were in the several blockading squadrons in January last, exclusive of other duty, 471 vessels and 2455 guns. There are now but 29 of the Navy Vessels remaining on the coast, carrying 210 guns,

Report

of the

Secretary

for 1865,

p. x.

1865.

exclusive of howitzers." Superfluous vessels were sold by hundreds and the money covered into the Treasury; thousands of the officers and sailors who had patriotically left the merchant service to fight under the national flag went back to the pursuits of peace.

For the purposes of pacification and the reëstablishment of the national authority the country was divided into five grand divisions- that of the Atlantic, commanded by Meade; the Mississippi, by Sherman; the Gulf, by Sheridan; the Tennessee, by Thomas; and the Pacific, by Halleck. These again were subdivided into nineteen departments, and we print here the names of the generals commanding them for the last time, as a roll of the men who survived the war, most favored by fortune and their own merits: Hooker, Hancock, Augur, Ord, Stoneman, Palmer (J. M.), Pope, Terry, Schofield, Sickles, Steedman, Foster (J. G.), Wood (T. J.), Wood (R. C.), Canby, Wright, Reynolds (J.J.), Steele, McDowell. The success or failure of these soldiers in administering the trust confided to them, their relations to the people among whom they were stationed, and to the President who succeeded to the vacant chair of Lincoln, form no part of the story we have attempted to tell.

On the 13th of June the President proclaimed the insurrection at an end in the State of Tennessee; it was not until the second day of April, 1866,

[graphic]

1866.

that he proclaimed a state of peace as existing in CH. XVII. the rest of the United States, and then he excepted the State of Texas; on the 20th of August, in the same year, he made his final proclamation, announcing the reëstablishment of the national authority in Texas, and thereupon he concluded, "I do further proclaim that the said insurrection is at an end, and that peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America."

Thus the war ended. The carnage and the waste of it had surpassed the darkest forebodings, the most reckless prophecies. On the Union side 2,200,000 men had enlisted;1 on the Confederate, about 1,000,000. Of these 110,000 Union soldiers were killed or mortally wounded in battle; 2 a quarter of a million died of other causes. The total of deaths by the war on the Northern side amounted to 360,282. The number of the Confederate dead cannot be accurately ascertained; it ranges between 250,000 and 300,000. The expense of the war to the Union, over and above the ordinary expenses of the government, was about $3,250,000,000; to the Confederacy less than half that amount, about $1,500,000,000.

It seems a disheartening paradox to the lovers of peace that all this homicide and spoil gave only a new impulse to the growth and the wealth of the nation. We have seen how the quick eye of Lincoln recognized the fact, on the very night of election, that the voting strength of the country was

1 There were 2,690,401 names 2 Sixty-seven thousand and fifon the rolls, but these included reënlistments.

ty-eight killed 43,012 died of
wounds.

CH. XVII. greater in 1864 than it had been in 1860, and the census of 1870 showed a prodigious advance in prosperity and population. The 31,443,321 of 1860 had in the ten troubled years of war and reconstruction increased to 38,558,371; and the wealth of the country had waxed in an astonishing proportion, from $16,159,616,068 to $30,068,518,507. Even the reconquered States shared in this enormous progress.

CHAPTER XVIII

LINCOLN'S FAME

HE death of Lincoln awoke all over the world CH. XVIII.

THE

a quick and deep emotion of grief and admiration. If he had died in the days of doubt and gloom which preceded his reëlection, he would have been sincerely mourned and praised by the 'friends of the Union, but its enemies would have curtly dismissed him as one of the necessary and misguided victims of sectional hate. They would have used his death to justify their malevolent forebodings, to point the moral of new lectures on the instability of democracies. But as he had fallen in the moment of a stupendous victory, the halo of a radiant success enveloped his memory and dazzled the eyes even of his most hostile critics. That portion of the press of England and the Continent which had persistently vilified him now joined in the universal chorus of elegiac praise. Cabinets and courts which had been cold

1 One of the finest poems on the occasion of his death was that in which the London "Punch” made its manly recantation of the slanders with which it had pursued him for four years:

Beside this corpse that bears for winding-sheet
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?
Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.

1865.

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