102 CONDUCT OF THE SLAVES. [SECT. VII. ments, they continued peaceably their accustomed agricultural labors; in those near which the national armies passed, they merely escaped to freedom. But if, on the one hand, they nobly abstained from retaliation, on the other they exhibited fidelity to their friends. The national officers, many of them reluctantly, but all in the end, frankly bore testimony to the invaluable services. they rendered. The information they gave was uniformly found to be true-so true that great army movements sometimes depended on it. They never deceived and never betrayed the Yankee. Many very affecting narratives have been published of the escape of national prisoners of war from their Confederate guards. In all these it is the same story; the fugi tive is passed on from one negro cabin to another; he is hidden by day and guided by night; he is fed, and clothed, and comforted. But, if thus the negro, by abstaining from riot, insurrection, and the perpetration of private atrocities, in part repaid to the female society of the South in its hour of des olation and distress, the deep obligation he was under for his conversion from a pagan to a Christian life, he showed that he could vindicate himself as a man when publicly called upon by the authority of his country, and clothed in the uniform of her soldiery. Then he met his former master in open warfare face to face, and on many a bloodstained field made good his title to freedom. By the blockade, and the armies gathered on the frontier, the slave power was shut out from the world. It was encircled with a wall of fire. Far from being the paradise predicted by the authors of secession, that inclosure was a scene of tyranny and woe. No one will ever justly measure the desperate energy with which Actual condition of the South during the war. CHAP. XXXIX.] THE SOUTH IN A STATE OF SIEGE. 103 its inhabitants tried to burst through the investing line; no one will ever fully know the agony they endured. As soon as military operations assumed a determinate It was a state of siege. was, character, the Southern States stood in the attitude of a beleaguered fortress-the war in truth, a vast siege; that fortress covered an area of more than 700,000 square miles; the lines of investment around it extended over more than 10,500 miles. Eight millions of people of European descent, their men second to none on earth in those virtues which insure military glory, and yielding only to their own women in fervid patriotism, were shut up with four millions of Af rican slaves. It was a siege, but such a siege as had never been witnessed before. Advantages possessed by its rul ers. In two particulars the South had at the outset of the movement great advantage. Her leaders were men who, from their long connection with the United States government, had be come familiar with the methods of administration. The president of the Confederacy, Davis, had for many years been the national Secretary of War. In this respect he stood in signal contrast to his antagonist, Lincoln; the one had a practical knowledge of all the requirements and all the details of military life, but the wordy warfare of country law-courts, the noisy disputations of contested elections, were the only preparation of the other. Advantages in its manner of arm ing. In a second particular the South had a great advantage. She entered upon the conflict not only armed, but armed at the cost of her enemy. The warlike munitions she obtained through the acts of Twiggs in Texas, and Floyd in Washington; through the seizure of so many forts upon the coast, and of dock-yards, armories, and other places of dépôt, gave her all that at the outset she required. The value of these acquisitions was not to be measured merely by 104 CONSTRUCTION OF ITS POLITICAL SYSTEM. [SECT. VII. their money worth, though that was very great, amounting to many millions of dollars. Their opportuneness was of equal moment. The South, Minerva-like, sprang to the contest ready both in head and hand. Rapid construction of their political fabric. To Europeans, by whom these great advantages were at first imperfectly understood, the South presented a very imposing spectacle. Even to those who regarded her movement with unfriendly eyes, the sudden completion of her political fabric appeared very surprising. In the Old World revolutionary movements have been commonly undertaken, not by those who have been all their lives habituated to public office, who are familiar with every state secret, who have had for years an opportunity of shaping the course of things to suit their own ends, who are in a position to seize a large part of the material means of the state, but by persons whose position is unfavorable, and whose means often inadequate. The organization of an efficient government by the Confederates loses much of its imposing appearance when it is remembered that Davis did no more than is done by any new President of the United States on his accession. Lincoln, in fact, had much more formidable difficulties to encounter. He had to make provision against treachery. I have already related the facts connected with the formation of the Confederate government at Montgomery (vol. i., p. 528, etc.), and in a subsequent chapter shall speak of its more important special acts. Of these, however, there is one which it is needful now to bring into prominence: it is the transference of capital, to allure the the seat of government from Montgomery to Richmond. It has been mentioned that, all things considered, this offers perhaps the most suitable point of division between the secession conspiracy and the establishment of an organized government. Richmond made the Border States. CHAP. XXXIX.] That measure was cessity. RICHMOND MADE THE CAPITAL. 105 The Conspiracy had no intention originally of establishing its seat of government at Richmond. That was a part of the price exacted by Virginia for her secession, and it was not paid without reluctance. It is to be remembered that at that time every thing seemed to turn on what the Border States would do. Lincoln spared no exertion to induce them to retain their allegiance: it was that consideration alone that caused him to deal so reluctantly with the slave question. On the other hand, Davis, both by promises and by violence, sought to draw due to political ne- them over to his side. Had a Southern town, as Montgomery, been selected for a capital, measures like those which were actually carried into ef fect for the defense of Richmond must have been resorted to. Virginia, the most powerful of the Southern States, must have been stripped of her troops for the defense of a distant point, as Florida and Arkansas were, and thereby left an unresisting prey to the devastation of Northern armies; but by establishing the seat of government at Richmond, it became certain that the most powerful of the Southern armies would always be present in Virginia. If Virginia had been abandoned, all the Border States would have gone with the North. Richmond was not the Confederacy. So far as the permanent interests of the Confederacy were concerned, the views of those who lookthe seat of power to ed with disfavor on the selection of Richmond were doubtless correct. But, in fact, in such movements as that of secession, the seat of power lies not in any territorial locality; it is in the army. Richmond might have been taken, as Nashville was, and that without producing any definite result. Had M'Clel lan crowned his Peninsular campaign with its capture, it would have availed nothing so long as there were powerThat was in the ful armies still in the field. The overthrow of the Confederacy could be accomplished army. 106 WASHINGTON AND RICHMOND. [SECT. VII. only, and, indeed, was accomplished only, by the destruction or surrender of those armies. But Washington is the nation. Very different was it with Washington; that was recognized all over the world as the long-estabthe seat of power of lished seat of the American government. Its fall would have been to the North an irreparable loss. There is now but little doubt that, had the Confederacy been able to seize it, European recognition would at once have followed. It was the clear perception of this relative value that controlled Lincoln's movements in the Peninsular campaign: he perceived that Richmond was no equivalent for Washington. And, on the other hand, there never was a moment at which Davis would not have been glad that Richmond should have been wrested from him, if, at the same time, he could have secured Washington. Coincidence of the centre of power. It may, perhaps, not be inappropriate here to remark that the reasons which originally led to the metropolis with the selection of Washington as the metropolitan site have in the course of events lost their weight. So long as the republic consisted of the colonial settlements on the Atlantic border, Washington was centrally situated. But what might answer for a narrow coast border does not apply to a continent. Washington has been captured by a foreign army once, and has been in imminent peril of capture again and again during the Civil War. It has ceased to be the appropriate site for the metropolis of the great continental republic. During the recent strife its defense not only cost many thousands of lives and many millions of money: it also paralyzed some of the most important movements of the war. But as the old colonial states decline in relative political sig nificance, and the weight of power settles in the West, it Possible transfer is not improbable that Western influence ence to the Mississippi Valley, predominating will draw the capital into the |