ields were cultivated, not only to
supply the population of the North and the troops invading the South,
but to ship abroad to pay a part of the expense of the war. In the
North the press was free up to the point of open treason. The citizen
could entertain his views and express them. Troops were necessary in
the Northern States to prevent prisoners from the Southern army being
released by outside force, armed and set at large to destroy by fire our
Northern cities. Plans were formed by Northern and Southern citizens to
burn our cities, to poison the water supplying them, to spread infection
by importing clothing from infected regions, to blow up our river and
lake steamers--regardless of the destruction of innocent lives. The
copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes,
and belittled those of the Union army. It was, with a large following,
an auxiliary to the Confederate army. The North would have been much
stronger with a hundred thousand of these men in the Confederate ranks
and the rest of their kind thoroughly subdued, as the Union sentiment
was in the South, than we were as the battle was fought.

As I have said, the whole South was a military camp. The colored
people, four million in number, were submissive, and worked in the field
and took care of the families while the able-bodied white men were at
the front fighting for a cause destined to defeat. The cause was
popular, and was enthusiastically supported by the young men. The
conscription took all of them. Before the war was over, further
conscriptions took those between fourteen and eighteen years of age as
junior reserves, and those between forty-five and sixty as senior
reserves. It would have been an offence, directly after the war, and
perhaps it would be now, to ask any able-bodied man in the South, who
was between the ages of fourteen and sixty at any time during the war,
whether he had been in the Confederate army. He would assert that he
had, or account for his absence from the ranks. Under such
circumstances it is hard to conceive how the North showed such a
superiority of force in every battle fought. I know they did not.

During 1862 and '3, John H. Morgan, a partisan officer, of no military
education, but possessed of courage and endurance, operated in the rear
of the Army of the Ohio in Kentucky and Tennessee. He had no base of
supplies to protect, but was at home wherever he went. The army
operating a