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.

[645] There was nothing fatal in a military point of view in Sherman's memorable march; and yet it dated the first chapter of the subjugation of the Confederacy. It brought the demoralization of the country to the surface; it had plainly originated in the pragmatic and excessive folly of President Davis; it furnished a striking occasion for recrimination, and was accompanied with a loss of confidence in his administration, that nothing but a miracle could repair.

We have already referred in another part of this work to the physical impossibility of the subjugation of the South at the hands of the North, as long as the integrity of the public resolution was maintained. This impossibility was clearly and distinctly stated, in an address of the Congress to the people of the Confederate States as late as the winter of 1864-5. That body then declared, with an intelligence that no just student of history will fail to appreciate: “The passage of hostile armies through our country, though productive of cruel suffering to our people, and great pecuniary loss, gives the enemy no permanent advantage or foothold. To subjugate a country, its civil government must be suppressed by a continuing military force, or supplanted by another, to which the inhabitants yield a voluntary or forced obedience. The passage of hostile armies through our territory cannot produce this result. Permanent garrisons would have to be stationed at a sufficient number of points to strangle all civil government before it could be pretended, even by the United States Government itself, that its authority was extended over these States. How many garrisons would it require? How many hundred thousand soldiers would suffice to suppress the civil government of all the States of the Confederacy, and to establish over them, even in name and form, the authority of the United States? In a geographical point of view, therefore, it may be asserted that the conquest of these Confederate States is impracticable.”

The “geographical point of view” was decisive. The Confederacy was yet far from the extremity of subjugation, even after Sherman had marched from Northern Georgia to the sea-coast. He had left a long scar on the State; but he had not conquered the country; he had been unable to leave a garrison on his route since he left Dalton; and even if he passed into the Carolinas, to defeat him at any stage short of Richmond would be to re-open and recover all the country he had overrun. It was the fashion in the North to get up painted maps, in which all the territory of the South traversed by a Federal army, or over which there was a cob-web line of military occupation, was marked as conquest, and the other parts designated