had been educated at West Point, had fought through the Mexican War, had been four years at the head of the War Department, and been succeeded therein by Floyd, a man after his own heart, who left the service, at the close of 1860, in precisely that state which was deemed most favorable to their great design. One, if not both, of them knew personally almost every officer in our service; knew the military value of each; knew that he was pliant or otherwise to the behests of slaveholding treason. They knew whom to call away to help organize and lead their own forces, and who, even if loyal, would serve them better in our armies than he could do in their own. The immense advantages they thus secured can never be overestimated. Their Generals exposed their lives in leading or repelling charges with a reckless courage which made promotions rapid in their ranks; and, where the troops on both sides are raw and undisciplined, the bravest and most determined officers, if capable, are seldom beaten. In the course of the war, eminent courage and conspicuous cowardice were often displayed on either side; but the Rebels were seldom beaten through the pusillanimity, never through the treachery, of their leaders.

On the other hand, President Lincoln, without military education or experience, found himself suddenly plunged into a gigantic and, to him, most unexpected war, with no single

12" Mr. Lincoln," said an officer who called at the White House during the dark days, when Washington was isolated and threatened from every side, "every one else may desert you, but I never will." Mr. Lincoln thanked and dismissed

ing to military genius or experience, and with the offices of his army filled to his hand by those who were now the chiefs of the Rebellion. His officers were all strangers to him; many of them superannuated and utterly inefficient, yet bearing names associated with remembered heroism, and not to be shelved without invoking popular as well as personal reprobation. How should an Illinois lawyer, fresh from comparative obscurity, and who never witnessed the firing of a platoon or read a page of Vauban, presume to say, even had he dared to think, that the illustrious Lieutenant-General at the head of our armies, covered all over with the deep scars of wounds received in glorious conflicts nearly half a century ago, no longer possessed the mental vigor requisite to the planning of campaigns or the direction of military movements? The bare suggestion, on Mr. Lincoln's part, would have been generally scouted as the acme of ignorant conceit and fool-hardy presumption.

But not merely was it true that, while Jefferson Davis was not only able to place every man in his service exactly in the position he deemed him fitted for, while Abraham Lincoln had neither the requisite knowledge" nor the legal authority to do likewise with our officers, the fact that every one who went over to the Confederates thereby proved that his heart was in their cause, gave that side a just confidence in their mili

him to his duties. Two days afterward, he learned that this modern Peter had absconded to take service with the Rebels. His name was J. Bankhead Magruder, then a Lieut. Col. of Artillery; since, a Confederate Major-General.

507

ours.

*Heaven takes the good, too good on earth to stay, And leaves the bad, too bad to take away,"

has a qualified application to this

case.

Of the army officers -some two hundred in number-who went over to the Rebellion, not one fancied that he was consulting his own ease or physical comfort in so doing. Say they were ambitious, ' sectional,' traitorous, forsworn, or whatever you will: it is barely possible that some of them shared the prevalent Southern delusion that the North would not fight; but it is not probable that their error on this point at all approached that of their stay-at-home compatriots, who supposed the North" a small patch of country mainly devoted to the production of schoolmasters, counter-jumpers, peddlers, and keepers of watering-place hotels, all keen at a bargain, but never to be driven into a fight. Perhaps no other class of the Southern people were so free from the prevalent delusion on this head as were their relatively educated, widely-traveled, observant army officers, who, abandoning the service of their whole country, proffered their swords and their lives to the cause of Human Slavery. On the other hand, the indolent, the stolid, the consciously inefficient, who aspired to light work and easy living, naturally clung to a service wherein they had found what they most desired. The Confederacy might fail; the Union, even though defeated and curtailed, could not well absolutely go down. Many thus remained whose hearts

13" Do you know John Williams?" asked a Southern young lady of average education, addressing her Yankee school-mistress." No, I do

X. The more flagrant instances of official cowardice or imbecility which these pages must often record, will sometimes prompt the question"Were these men downright traitors?" And the general answer must be: Consciously, purposely, according to their own conceptions, they were not. They did not desire, nor seek to compass, the division of the republic. Many of them were not even bewildered by the fatal delusion of State omnipotence. They hoped for and sought such an issue from our perilous complications as would leave our country undivided, and stronger, more powerful, greater than before. But they had undoubtingly imbibed that one-sided, narrow, false conception of the genius and history of our political fabric which identifies Slavery with the Constitution, making the protection and conservation of the former the chief end of our National existence-not a local and sectional excrescence, alien and hostile to the true nature and paramount ends of our system, to be borne with patience and restrained from diffusing its virus until opportunity should be presented for its safe eradication. To this large and influential class of our officers, the Rebellion seemed a sad mistake, impelled and excused by the factious, malignant, unjustifiable refusal of the Republicans to give ‘the South' her 'rights' in the territories; and they controllingly desired that there should be the least possible

enormous cost of the struggle should calm or overbear the rage of extremists on both sides, and induce reunion on the basis, substantially, of the Crittenden Compromise. Whoever keeps this explanation in mind will be enabled by it to comprehend movements, delays, vacillations, obstinate torpors, and even whole abortive campaigns, which must otherwise seem utterly unaccountable.

XI. The Rebellion had, moreover, a decided advantage in the respect that all its partisans, civil as well as military, were thoroughly in earnest, and ready to prove their faith by their works. "You are a Unionist," said a Baltimorean to a New York friend "I don't doubt it. But are you ready to fight for the Union? I am a Secessionist, and am going to fight for Secession." There were few real Secessionists who shrank from this test of their sincerity. On the side of the Union were the calm calculations of interest, the clear suggestions of duty, the inspirations of a broad, benignant patriotism; but these were tame and feeble impulses when contrasted with the vengeful hate, the quivering, absorbing rage, the

great body of the Secessionists, transforming even women into fiends. These impulses were sedulously cultivated and stimulated by the engineers of Disunion, through the uncontradicted diffusion by their journals of the most atrocious forgeries" and the most shameless inventions." The North was habitually represented to the ignorant masses of the South as thirsting for their blood and bent on their extermination—as sending forth her armies instructed to ravish, kill, lay waste, and destroy; and the pulpit was not far behind the press in disseminating these atrocious falsehoods. Hence, the Southern militia, and even conscripts, were impelled by a hate or horror of their adversaries adversaries which rendered them valiant in their own despite, making them sometimes victors where the memories of their grandfathers at Charleston and at Guilford, and of their fathers at Bladensburg, had led their foes to greatly undervalue their prowess and their efficiency.

XII. Whether Slavery should prove an element of strength or of weakness to the Rebellion necessarily depended on the manner in which it should be

cholera, or measles, or small pox, or hot weather, or hard living, or cold steel, or hot shot! Go!'" 15 The Norfolk (Va.) Herald of April 22d, said: "It is rumored that Lincoln has been drunk for three days, and that Capt. Lee has command at the Capitol; and also that Col. Lee, of Virginia, who lately resigned, is bombarding Washington from Arlington Hights. If so, it will account for his not having arrived here to take command, as was expected.”

The New Orleans Picayune of about May 15th, 1861, said:

three drummer boys. Gen. Butler, in command, is a native of Liberia. Our readers may recollect old Ben, the barber, who kept a shop in Poydras-street, and emigrated to Liberia with a small competence. Gen. Butler is his son."

16

to undoubting confidence that they were to be largely aided by coöperation and diversion on the part of their Northern friends and allies. They did not, for a moment, suppose that the Free States were to be, even in appearance, a unit against their efforts. Doubtless, there was disappointment on both sides the North believing that there could never fail to be an open and active Union party at the South; while the South counted on like aid from the North; but there was this material difference between the two cases: The Southern leaders had received innumerable assurances, through a series of years, of Northern sympathy and aid in the anticipated struggle for their rights;' while probably no single Republican had received a letter or message from any Southron of note, urging that no concession be made, but that the Disunionists be crowded to the wall, and compelled to back square out or fight. On the contrary, almost every Southern plea for the Union had assumed as its basis that the North could, would, and should, be induced to recede from its position of resistance to Slavery Extension, or else

6

The alternative was not always plainly expressed; but the inference was irresistible, that Southern Unionism differed from Secessionism in that it

16 The New Orleans Picayune of February 21st, 1861, had a letter from its New York correspondent 'Antelope,' dated the 13th, which, with reference to Mr. Lincoln's speech, two days earlier, at Indianapolis, said:

"Lincoln even goes so far as to intimate that hostile armies will march across the seceded States to carry out the darling project of recapture, and the 'enforcement of the laws,' but he surely could not have counted the dreadful and sickening result when such a course wandered through his hot and frenzied brain. March hostile armies through the Southern States! Why, where are the armies to come from that are to

proposed allowing the North a month or two longer wherein to back out of its chosen position before visiting its perverseness with the retribution of fire and sword. Wait a little longer,' was the burden of Southern appeals for persistence in Unionism: the North is preparing to recede: she will presently agree, rather than fight, to give us, at least, the Crittenden Compromise.' But suppose she should not-what then? This question was sometimes answered, sometimes not; but the logical inference was inevitable: Then we will unite with you in a struggle for Disunion." Here were the toils in which Virginia Unionism had immeshed itself before the bombardment of Sumter, and which foredoomed it to suicide directly thereafter.

The more earnest and resolute Southerners had been talking of their 'rights' and their 'wrongs,' for a number of years, in such a definite, decisive way that they felt that no one could justifiably fail to comprehend them. Some of them were Disunionists outright-regarded separation as at all events desirable for the South, and certain to enhance her prosperity, wealth, and power. Others preferred to remain in the Union, if they could shape its policy and mold it to their will; but the

take up the march? Where are the loans of money to come from to carry on this diabolical and fiendish crime? An American army sufficiently powerful cannot be raised to do it; while, as regards the raising of moneys to prosecute the fratricidal strife, New York, the banking emporium of the Union, will refuse, point blank, to advance a dollar for so unholy a purpose. ***

"No! no! The South is too terribly in earnest for our bankers to furnish the sinews wherewith to whip it back to its 'allegiance;' and, if the atrocious game should still be persisted in, instead of having the funds to work with, the new Government of Mr. Lincoln will find itself flat upon its back."