that had not yet seceded for their several quotas required to make up an army of 75,000 men, with which in effect to coerce the seceding states into submission. He demanded that Virginia should furnish her quota of troops for this purpose, and Virginia, deeming the purpose to be an unlawful and iniquitous one, decided to secede—as she had thitherto resolutely refused to do—rather than aid in a coercion which all her Union-loving and peace-loving people regarded as a wrong, an injustice, an unconstitutional and unlawful aggression upon the rights of sovereign states.
Virginia seceded unwillingly and not at all because her people regarded Mr. Lincoln's election as affording any just ground for the withdrawal of any state from the Union, but solely because the mother state was forced to choose between secession on the one hand and the lending of active assistance on the other to what all Virginians regarded as a wicked and wanton warfare by the Federal Government upon sovereign states for having exercised what all Virginians held—as most Americans had previously and sometimes aggressively held—to be their reserved rights under the Constitution.
It was on the fifteenth day of April, 1861, that Mr. Lincoln called upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to coerce the seceding states into submission. It was on the sixteenth day of April that Virginia's constitutional convention, bravely resolute in its love for the Union and in its antagonism to the policy of secession, was confronted with the choice of furnishing troops to aid in what its members almost unanimously regarded as a political crime or the alternative of joining that secession movement from which the sober and conservative thought of Virginia had so long and so courageously held aloof in defiance of criticism and in face of contempt and contumely.
To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war or peace was finally decided in behalf of war—war to the limit of possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of exhaustion on the one side or the other.
A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do—even by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last. The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168—or nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms. There was in effect a levy en masse, including the entire white male population from early boyhood to extreme old age.
Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none. It was certain from the beginning that the Federal authorities would completely shut the South in by blockading and closely sealing every southern port. Thus the Federals—as was apparent in advance—were destined to have the whole world to draw upon for soldiers, for supplies, for ammunition, for improved arms and for everything else that contributes to military strength, while the South must rely absolutely upon itself—ill armed, and unequipped with anything except courage, devotion and heroic fortitude.
There were no facilities at the South for the manufacture of arms. There was not an armory in all that land that could turn out a musket of the pattern then in use, not a machine shop that could convert a muzzle-loading rifle into a breech-loader or give to any gun so much as a choke bore. There were foundries that could cast iron cannon of an antique pattern, but not one that could make a modern gun. There were machine shops—a very few—in which the Northern-made locomotives then in use on Southern railroads could be repaired in a small way, but there was not in all the South a shop in which a useful locomotive could be built. Nor were there any car builders who had had experience in the making of rolling stock fit for service.
In brief the South was an agricultural region accustomed to depend upon the North and upon Europe for its mechanical devices and the outbreak of war was clearly destined to be the signal for the shutting off of both Northern and European supplies. Even in the matter of medicines—and greatly more soldiers die of disease than of wounds—the South had no adequate supply and no assured means of creating one for itself. Quinine, calomel and opium were scarcely less necessary than gunpowder and bullets to the conduct of military operations. Yet there was nowhere in the South a "plant" that could produce any one of those drugs. Nor was there anywhere a mercury supply from which calomel might be made. Early in the war it became impossible to procure so much as a Seidlitz powder in the South. There was nowhere a factory that could make a scalpel, to say nothing of more ingeniously contrived surgical implements. The materials for making gunpowder were so wanting that citizens were urged a little later to dig up the earthen floors of their smoke-houses and their tobacco barns and were instructed in the art of extracting the niter from them. In the towns women were officially solicited to save their chamber lye and deliver it to the authorities in order that its chemicals might be utilized in the creation of explosives. Farmers were by law forbidden to burn corn cobs in their fire places and required to turn them over instead to the authorities in order that their sodas and potashes might be utilized in the manufacture of gunpowder. Women were urged to grow poppies and instructed in the art of so scarring the plants as to secure the precious gum from which opium could be made for the relief of suffering in the hospitals. They were taught also how to harvest and stew dog-fennel in order to secure a substitute for quinine. The negro boys were set at work to dig up the roots of the dogwood, and women were taught to extract from the bark of such roots a bitters which served as a substitute for the unobtainable quinine.
In short, at every point the South was lamentably lacking in supplies, and the blockade, established early in the war, forbade the incoming of such things as were needed except at serious risk of capture and confiscation.
Even food supplies were from the first to the last meager. The South produced very little corn, pork, wheat, and the like, in comparison with the production of the great northwestern states or in comparison with the need that was created by the enlistment of all the able-bodied white men of that region in the Confederate army.
Thus the South was at a fearful disadvantage from the first; the wiser men of the South knew the fact in advance. They had courage and they had little else. Their achievement in maintaining a strenuous war for four years in face of such disparities of force and resources, must always be accounted to their credit as brave and resourceful men.
It was certain from the first that the South must be beaten in its struggle—unless by dash and daring it should win at once, or unless, by some remote chance, assistance should come from without. The chance of that was very small but it existed as a factor in the problem. The chief hope the Southern people had of winning the war upon which they entered with courage and enthusiasm was born of the delusive belief that the god of battles awards victory, not to the strong but to the righteous. They devoutly believed that their cause was righteous, and, in spite of all the teachings of history, they expected God to interpose in some fashion to give them the victory. They believed themselves to be battling for the same right of self-government among men that their revolutionary ancestors had fought for, and they refused to recognize any disparity of resources between the contending forces as a sufficient reason for their failure under the rule of a just God in whose reign over human affairs they devoutly believed.
They were sentimentalists. They believed that ideas rather than facts ruled the world and its affairs. They had been nurtured upon the Bible and Scott's novels, and they believed in both.
Had any prophet arisen among them who should
