good portion of these. The slaves, the
non-combatants, one-third of the whole, were required to work in the
field without regard to sex, and almost without regard to age. Children
from the age of eight years could and did handle the hoe; they were not
much older when they began to hold the plough. The four million of
colored non-combatants were equal to more than three times their number
in the North, age for age and sex for sex, in supplying food from the
soil to support armies. Women did not work in the fields in the North,
and children attended school.
The arts of peace were carried on in the North. Towns and cities grew
during the war. Inventions were made in all kinds of machinery to
increase the products of a day's labor in the shop, and in the field.
In the South no opposition was allowed to the government which had been
set up and which would have become real and respected if 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
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