Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[362] flour, cotton, hay, crops, &c. He pointed out the fact that the Government had devised a system of taxation by tariff which imposed a burden on the West, to benefit manufacturing in New England, and paid indirectly sixty millions into the treasury and hundreds of millions into the pockets of capitalists, from the consumers, who were mostly farmers in the West. He complained of a system of internal taxation, costing for collection some four millions extra, which might have been saved, and levying in one year $150,000,000 as interest only on a great national debt, and with an army of newly-made office-holders, with exorbitant salaries. He stated that within six hundred and fifty-one days, a party had succeeded which proposed, by legislation and proclamation, to break down a labour system in eleven States, of four millions of negroes, whose industry had been productive hitherto, worth, on or before the 4th of March, 1861, an average of $500 apiece, being in all two thousand millions of dollars. He prophesied that when this capital was destroyed the objects of this pseudophilanthropy would remain on hand, North and South, as a mass of dependent and improvident black beings, for whose care the tax would be almost equal to the war-tax, before their condition would again be fixed safely and prosperously. He concluded with the summary and startling statement that within these six hundred and fifty-one days the rights of personal liberty, freedom from arrest without process, freedom for press and speech, and the right of habeas corpus had been suspended and limited, and, at times, destroyed; and in the place of resurrected and promised liberty to four million blacks, the North had the destruction of that liberty which the past eight hundred years had awarded to the Anglo-Saxon race.

The triumphs of the Democratic party had taken place in the most powerful and populous States of the North. The States in which the party gained in the fall elections of 1862 contained a majority of the Free State population; had two-thirds of the wealth of the North; and furnished a majority of the troops in the field against us. This important and imposing demonstration of public opinion in the North was interpreted by the Republican party as significant of a Democratic design of “reconstruction,” in which the Southern States might be brought back into the Union with new constitutional guaranties. But this idea, if it was ever seriously entertained by the Democratic party of the North, found enough to discourage it in the manner in which the bare suggestion of it was cried down in all parts of the Confederacy, and by every organ of public opinion there. The Confederate press desperately and savagely denounced the idea of “reconstruction.” The Examiner said of the Northern people: “They do not yet understand that we are resolute to be rid of them forever, and determined rather to die than to live with them in the same political community again.” The Dispatch declared:

We warn the