are the
center of the picture. Their flight to preserve the children was no
small test of courage. Almost invariably they had to traverse desolate
country, with few attendants, through forests, and across rivers, where
the arm of the law was now powerless to protect them. Outlaws, defiant
of the authorities both civil and military,--ruthless men of whom we
shall hear again,--roved those great unoccupied spaces so characteristic
of the Southern countryside. Many a family legend preserves still the
sense of breathless caution, of pilgrimage in the night-time intently
silent for fear of these masterless men. When the remote rendezvous had
been reached, there a colony of refugees drew together in a steadfast
despair, unprotected by their own fighting men. What strange sad pages
in the history of American valor were filled by these women outwardly
calm, their children romping after butterflies in a glory of sunshine,
while horrid tales drifted in of deeds done by the masterless men in
the forest just beyond the horizon, and far off on the soul's horizon
fathers, husbands, brothers, held grimly the lines of last defense!

Chapter VII. The Turning Of The Tide

The buoyancy of the Southern temper withstood the shock of Gettysburg
and was not overcome by the fall of Vicksburg. Of the far-reaching
significance of the latter catastrophe in particular there was little
immediate recognition. Even Seddon, the Secretary of War, in November,
reported that "the communication with the Trans-Mississippi, while
rendered somewhat precarious and insecure, is found by no means cut off
or even seriously endangered." His report was the same sort of thing
as those announcements of "strategic retreats" with which the world has
since become familiar. He even went so far as to argue that on the whole
the South had gained rather than lost; that the control of the river was
of no real value to the North; that the loss of Vicksburg "has on our
side liberated for general operations in the field a large army, while
it requires the enemy to maintain cooped up, inactive, in positions
insalubrious to their soldiers, considerable detachments of their
forces."

Seddon attempted to reverse the facts, to show that the importance of
the Mississippi in commerce was a Northern not a Southern concern.
He threw light upon the tactics of the time by his description of the
future action of Confederate sharpshooters who were to terrorize such
commercial crews