fallacy consists in taking the very results of Confederate mal-administration, and putting them in comparison against a full exhibition of Northern power in the war. 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 judg ment 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 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 of the South was fully represented in that surrender. 66 TWO POLICIES OF RECONSTRUCTION." 743 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 onies, that they should be "admitted to a share in the British Constitution." It was precisely this enlightened lesson which those who agreed in the sentiment of clemency, proposed to apply to the condition of the Southern States. It was this party which took its instruction from exalted schools of statesmanship; which looked at the situation from the eminence of History; and which desired to bind up with the Federal authority the rights, peace, and prosperity of all parts of the country. Obviously the policy of this party, with reference to what was called "Reconstruction," was to consider the Southern States as in the Union, without any ceremonies or conditions other than what might be found in the common Constitution of the country. What may be designated generally as the Conservative party in the North, had long held the doctrine that, as the Union was inviolable and permanent, secession was illegal, revolutionary, null, and void; that it had no legal validity or effect; that it was the act of seditious individuals, and did not affect the status of the States purporting to secede. This branch of their doctrine was accepted by a large number of the Republican party; among them Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State. President Lincoln had acted upon this theory when it became necessary to reorganize States overrun by Federal armies. It was held by the Conservative party, against all rational dispute, that the business of the Federal Government, with respect to the insurgent States, was simply to quell resistance, and to execute everywhere the Constitution and laws. Its contest was not with the States, but with the illegal powers within the States engaged in resisting its authority. When the resistance of these persons ceased, the work was done; and the States were co instante, ipso facto, as much within the Union as ever; no act of re-admission being necessary. It only remained for the judiciary to proceed by indictment and legal trial, under the forms of law, against the individuals who had resisted the authority of the Union to test the fact of treason, and to vindicate the reputation of the Government. And this was the whole extent to which the policy of penalities could be insisted upon. On this opinion there was soon to be a sharp and desperate array of parties at Washington. When, by the tragical death of President Lincoln, in a public theatre, at the hands of one of the most indefensible but courageous assassins that history has ever produced, the Executive office passed to the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, the Southern people ignorantly deplored the change as one to their disadvantage, and the world indulged but small expectations from the coming man. The new President was sprung from a low order of life, and was what Southern gentlemen called a "scrub." In qualities of mind it was generally considered that he had the shallowness and fluency of the demagogue; but in this there was a mistake. At any rate, it must be confessed, Mr. Johnson had no literature and but little education of any sort; in his agrarian |