the rebellion
had been successful. No rear had to be protected. All the troops in
service could be brought to the front to contest every inch of ground
threatened with invasion. The press of the South, like the people who
remained at home, were loyal to the Southern cause.

In the North, the country, the towns and the cities presented about the
same appearance they do in time of peace. The furnace was in blast, the
shops were filled with workmen, the fields 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 h