Ante, Vol. IX., 1865. to foreshadow an intention to renew at a fitting CHAP. VII. moment the brotherly good-will gift to the South which has been treated of in the first part of this chapter. Such an inference finds strong corroboration in the phrases which closed the last public address he ever made, and which we have elsewhere quoted in full. On Tuesday evening, pp. 457-463. April 11, a considerable assemblage of citizens of Washington gathered at the Executive Mansion to celebrate the victory of Grant over Lee. The rather long and careful speech which Mr. Lincoln made on that occasion was, however, less about the past than the future. It discussed the subject of reconstruction, as illustrated in the case of Louisiana, showing also how that issue was related to the questions of emancipation, the condition of the freedmen, the welfare of the South, and the ratification of the constitutional amendment. "So new and unprecedented is the whole case," he concluded, "that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper." Can any one doubt that this "new announcement" which was taking shape in his mind would again have embraced and combined justice to the blacks and generosity to the whites of the South, with union and liberty for the whole country? CHAPTER VIII FIVE FORKS CHAP. VIII. 1864 F ROM the hour of Mr. Lincoln's reëlection the Confederate cause was doomed. The cheering of the troops which greeted the news from the North was heard within the lines at Richmond and at Petersburg, and although the leaders maintained to the end their attitude of defiance, the impression rapidly gained ground among the people that the end was not far off. The stimulus of hope being gone, they began to feel the pinch of increasing want. Their currency had become almost worthless. In October a dollar in gold was worth thirty-five dollars in Confederate money; a month later it brought fifty dollars; with the opening of the new year the price rose to sixty dollars, and soon after to seventy; and despite the efforts of the Confederate treasury, which would occasionally rush into the market and beat down the price of gold ten or twenty per cent. in a day, the currency gradually depreciated until a hundred for one was offered and not taken. As a result of this vanishing value of their money a portentous rise took place in the prices of all the necessaries of life. It is hard for a people to recognize that their money is good for nothing; CH. VIII. to do this is to confess that their Government has failed: it was natural, therefore, for the unhappy citizens of Richmond to think that monstrous prices were being extorted for food, clothing, and fuel, when, in fact, they were paying no more than was reasonable. The journals and diaries of the time are filled with bitter execrations against the extortioners and forestallers; but when we translate their prices into the gold standard, we wonder how the grocers and clothiers lived. To pay a thousand dollars for a barrel of flour was enough to strike a householder with horror; but ten dollars is not a famine price. A suit of clothes cost from one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars; but if you divide this sum by seventy-five, there is very little profit left for the tailor. High prices, however, even if paid in dry leaves, are a hardship when dry leaves are not plentiful; and there was scarcity, even of Confederate money, in the South. In Richmond, which lived upon the war, the dearth was especially evident. The clerks in the departments received say four thousand dollars a year, hardly enough for a month's provisions. Skilled mechanics fared somewhat better. They could earn, so long as they kept out of the army, something like six thousand dollars a year. Statesmanship was cheap. A congressman's pay was five thousand five hundred dollars; but most of the civil officers of the Government managed to get their supplies at cost prices from the military stores. It was illegal; but they could not have lived otherwise, and they doubtless considered their lives necessary to their country. CH. VIII. The depreciation of the Confederate currency was an unmistakable symptom of a lack of confidence in the course of affairs, since it did not arise from inflation. On the contrary, George A. Trenholm, the Secretary of the Treasury, did all he could to check this dangerous tendency, going so far as to incur the reproaches of many who imagined his action enhanced prices. All dealers instinctively felt the money was worthless, and their only object was to get it out of their hands as soon as possible, at whatever prices, in exchange for objects of real value. One Confederate diarist records with indignation that he saw a Jew buy at auction an old set of tablespoons for $575, and makes this a cause of "A Rebel complaint against the Government, which permits men to acquire in this way the means of running away. Anybody who was able to leave the country became the object of the envy and hatred of those who remained behind. They began to treat their own financial system with contempt. When the officer in charge of the Treasury Note Bureau at Columbia, alarmed at the approach of Sherman, asked where he was to go, he could get no attention to his inquiries; one high functionary advising that he go to the devil. Jones, War Clerk's Jan., 1865. Jones, Rebel War Clerk's Vol. II., At every advance of General Grant's lines a new disturbance and alarm was manifested in Richmond, the first proof of which was always a fresh rigor in the enforcement, not only of existing conscription laws, but of the arbitrary orders of the frightened authorities. After the capture of Fort Harrison, on the north side of the James, squads of guards were sent into the streets with directions to arrest every able-bodied man they met. They paid no regard to passes or to certificates of exemption CHAP. VIII. or detail, but hurried the unhappy civilians off to the field, or herded them, pending their assignment to companies, within the railings of the public square. Two members of the Cabinet, John H. Reagan and George Davis, were thus arrested on the streets by the zealous guards in spite of their protestations, though they were, of course, soon recognized and released. The pavements were swept of every class of loiterers; the clerks in the departments with their exemptions in their pockets were carried off, whether able to do duty or not. It is said by one Confederate writer that the medical boards were ordered to exempt no one who seemed capable of bearing arms for ten days, and he mentions an instance where a man died, "Rebel on the eleventh day of his service, of consumption. Human nature will not endure such a strain as this: a week after this sweeping of Richmond for recruits, General William M. Gardner reported that more than half the men thus dragged to the trenches had deserted. Of those who remained, the members of influential families came, one by one, back to the town on various pretexts, increasing the bitterness of feeling among those too poor or too obscure to rescue their sons and brothers. Desertion grew too common to punish. Almost every man in the Confederacy was, by statute or decree, liable to military service, and yet hundreds of thousands of them were not in the army. If men were to be shot for deserting it would have been a question whether there were soldiers enough to shoot them. Mr. Davis acted prudently in remit Jones, "A p. 305. |