anter, "that there is a State called
Wisconsin that has sent thirty thousand men into your armies?"

"Oh, probably forty thousand," answered Sherman.

With the next battalion the questions and the answers are repeated. The
flag was that of a Minnesota regiment, say the 32d. The old planter had
never heard that there was such a State.

"My God!" he said when he had figured out the thousands of men who had
come to the front, from these so-called Indian territories, to maintain
the existence of the nation, "If we in the South had known that you had
turned those Indian territories into great States, we never should have
gone into this war." The incident throws a light upon the state of mind
of men in the South, even of well educated men in the South, at the
outbreak of the War. They might, of course, have known by statistics
that great States had grown up in the North-west, representing a
population of millions and able themselves to put into the field armies
to be counted by the thousand. They might have realised that these great
States of the North-west were vitally concerned with the necessity of
keeping the Mississippi open for their trade from its source to the Gulf
of Mexico. They might have known that those States, largely settled from
New England, were absolutely opposed to slavery. This knowledge was
within their reach but they had not realised the facts of the case. It
was their feeling that in the coming contest they would have to do only
with New England and the Middle States and they felt that they were
strong enough to hold their own against this group of opponents. That
feeling would have been justified. The South could never have been
overcome and the existence of the nation could never have been
maintained if it had not been for the loyal co-operation and the
magnificent resources of men and of national wealth that were
contributed to the cause by the States of the North-west. In 1880, I had
occasion, in talking to the two thousand students of the University of
Minnesota, to recall the utterance of the old planter. The students of
that magnificent University, placed in a beautiful city of two hundred
and fifty thousand inhabitants, found it difficult on their part to
realise, amidst their laughter at the ignorance of the old planter, just
what the relations of the South had been before the War to the new free
communities of the North-west.

In February, 1865, with the fall of Fort Fisher and the capture