not have been expected to fight for
his own enslavement. I saw Richmond about a month before the surrender.
It was like a city of the dead. Two weeks later I was in New York. It
teemed with life and bustle and energy.

The blots on the Confederacy were the cruel persecution of Union men
living in the South, who were, in many instances, dragged from their
families and put to death as traitors, and the maltreatment of Union
prisoners. The North tolerated Southern sympathizers, when not actually
engaged in plotting against the government, and treated Southern
prisoners with all the kindness possible. It has been said for the South
that while Union prisoners were starving, the Confederate troops in the
field were almost starving too. This is a dishonest subterfuge. The
Southern troops were starving not because ordinary food was not plentiful
in the Confederacy, but because of lack of transportation to carry the
food from the interior to the front, while the Union prisoners perished
from hunger in the midst of abundance. Again, even assuming the plea of
scarcity to be true, that would not palliate the numerous murders of
helpless prisoners by volleys fired into the stockades at the pleasure of
the guards.[1] There was a vindictiveness in these crimes which no plea
can extenuate.

[1] As one of the survivors of the massacre of November 25, 1864, at
Salisbury, North Carolina, I know whereof I speak.

* * *

The murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth removed the only man
who could have done justice to the South and controlled the passions of
the North. Lincoln was signally, providentially adapted to be the
nation's guide in the struggle which, under his leadership, was brought
to a successful conclusion. For the equally difficult task of
reconstruction he was likewise admirably qualified, and his death was
followed by a civil chaos almost as deplorable as armed disunion. From
that chaos the American people gradually emerged by force of their native
character and their fundamental sense of justice and of right. The South,
for some years subjected to the rule of camp-followers and freedmen,
gradually recovered from the devastation of war, and superior
intelligence came to the top, as it always will eventually. The Southern
people learned that they had other resources besides cotton, and they
began to emulate the North in the development of manufactures and mines.
T