In brief, the political and social revolution wrought by the war is matched and over-matched by the stupendous economic revolution produced, a revolution whose rewards to industry, to capital and to enterprise are such as the wildest visionary would have laughed at as a futile dream when the South lay stripped and stricken and staggering under its burden of perplexities at the end of a struggle which had taxed its material resources to the point of exhaustion and which had well-nigh exterminated its vigorous young manhood.
It is to tell the story of a war thus stupendous in its causes, its events and its consequences that this book is written. There is nowhere in history a story more dramatic, more heroic or more intimately inspired by those emotions that control human conduct and work out the events of human life. The endeavor in these volumes will be to relate that story with absolute loyalty to truth.
The writer of these pages is persuaded that the time has fully come when this may be acceptably done; that the time has passed away when any American of well ordered mind desires the perversion or the suppression of truth with respect to our war history. There is certainly nothing in that history of which any part of the American people need be ashamed.
The great actors in the drama have all passed away. The passions of the war are completely gone. Even in politics, war prejudices no longer play a part worth considering. The time seems fully come when one may write truth with regard to the war with the certainty of a waiting welcome for his words. The time has come which General Grant foresaw in 1865, when he predicted that the superb strategy and unconquerable endurance of Lee and the brilliant military play of Sherman, the splendid prowess of Stonewall Jackson and the picturesque achievements of Phil Sheridan, the extraordinary dash and enterprise of J. E. B. Stuart on the one side and of Custer on the other, would all be reckoned a common possession in the storehouse of American memory, a subject of pride and satisfaction wherever there might be an American to glory in the deeds of his countrymen.
The time has come when the prowess of the American soldier, equally on the one side and upon the other, his measureless courage, his exhaustless endurance, his all-defiant devotion to duty, his extraordinary steadiness under a fire such as few soldiers on earth have ever been called upon to face, his patience under long marchings, starvation and every circumstance of suffering, are subjects of justly indiscriminate admiration on both sides of a geographical line long since obliterated.
The story of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg may now be told to Northern ears as surely sympathetic with the heroism shown in that world-famous action as are any ears at the South. The heroic tale of the Federal assaults upon Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg where brave men, knowing the futility of their endeavors, obeyed orders and went to their deaths by thousands because it was their duty to do so may now be told to listening Southern ears with as absolute certainty of applause as if the story were related only to veterans of the Army of the Potomac.
"East is East, and West is West" writes Kipling in one of his finest ballads in celebration of generous personal courage. Paraphrasing, we may say: "North is North and South is South," but courage, heroism, devotion and a generous chivalry belong to no time and no country exclusively. They are the common possessions of all worthy manhood. Like the gold beneath the guinea's stamp they pass current wherever coined because their value is inherent.
CHAPTER I
A Public, not a Civil, War
The war of 1861–65 was in fact a revolution. Had the South succeeded in the purposes with which that war was undertaken it would have divided the American Republic into two separate and independent confederations of states, the Union and the Southern Confederacy. The North having succeeded, no such division was accomplished, but none the less was a revolution wrought as has been suggested in the introductory chapter of this work.
Familiarly, and by way of convenience, we are accustomed to call this "The Civil war," in contra-distinction from those other wars in which the American power has been arrayed against that of foreign nations. But the term "Civil war," as thus applied, is neither accurate nor justly descriptive. In all that is essential to definition this was a public and not a civil war and it is necessary to a just understanding of the struggle and its outcome to bear this fact in mind. Otherwise the entire attitude and conduct of the Federal government toward its antagonist must be inexplicable, inconsistent and wanting in dignity.
The Southern States asserted and undertook to maintain by a resolute appeal to arms, their right to an independent place among the nations of the earth. In the end they failed in that endeavor. But while the conflict lasted they so far maintained their contention as to win from their adversary a sufficient recognition of their attitude to serve all the purposes of public rather than civil war.
They instituted and maintained a government, with a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, a department of state, an army, a navy, a treasury, and all the rest of the things that independent nations set up as the official equipment of their national housekeeping.
Not only did foreign powers recognize their right to make war, not as rebels but as legitimate belligerents entitled to all the consideration that the laws of civilized war guarantee to nations, but the United States government itself made similar recognition of the South's status as a power possessed of the right to make war.
At the outset there was quibbling of course, and a deal of playing for position. But in view of the obvious facts all this quickly gave way to a perfectly frank recognition on both sides of the truth that there was legitimate public war between the North in the name of the Union and the South organized as the Southern Confederacy; that the struggle involved the question of the independence of the South on the one hand and the indissolubility of the Federal Union on the other; that the conflict was the result of an entirely legitimate appeal to arms for the decision of questions which no other arbitrament could decide; and that the contest must be fought out not as a struggle between constituted authority on the one hand and insurrection on the other but as a controversy between two powers, each of which was legitimately entitled to assert its contentions and to maintain its attitude by every means known to civilized war.
All this was reflected, while the war lasted, in the treatment of men captured on either side as prisoners of war; in negotiations for the exchange of prisoners with full recognition of military rank on either side; in the issue, the observance and the enforcement of paroles; in safe conducts frequently granted and always honorably respected; in agreements for the immunity from arrest of medical officers and other non-combatants; in the humane and civilized arrangements made between opposing generals for the equal care of the wounded of either army by the surgeons of both, and in a score or a hundred other ways.
And when the war was over both sides fully recognized and emphasized its character as a legitimate public war and not in any respect as an insurrection. When the broken fragments of the organized armies of the South surrendered, there was an end of the controversy. The Southern people made no effort to prolong the struggle in irregular ways, as they easily might have done. They set their faces against all attempts to inaugurate a guerilla warfare, a thing which would have been easy to them. Under the advice of General Lee and their other great leaders the soldiers of the Confederacy accepted the surrender of the Confederate armies as a sovereign act that made an end not only of the war but of their right to make war. By their immediate return to ways of peace and by their sincere acceptance of the terms offered in Mr. Lincoln's promptly issued amnesty proclamation they marked and emphasized their view that they had been engaged, not in a disorderly insurrection, but in a legitimate, public war, the military end of which marked the end of their right to carry on hostilities of any kind or character.
Equally on the other side, the public character of the war was recognized by every act of the government. There was not even one prosecution for treason. Congress imposed upon the Southern States