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.

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[727] not amount to a battle. There was no last great convulsion, such as usually marks the final struggles of a people's devotion or the expiring hours of their desperation. The word “surrender” travelled from Virginia to Texas. A four years contest terminated with the smallest incident of blood-shed; it lapsed; it passed by a rapid and easy transition into a profound and abject submission.

There must be some explanation of this flat conclusion of the war. It is easily found. Such a condition could only take place in a thorough demoralization of the armies and people of the Confederacy; there must have been a general decay of public spirit, a general rottenness of public affairs when a great war was thus terminated, and a contest was abandoned so short of positive defeat, and so far from the historical necessity of subjugation.

There has been a very superficial, and, to some people, a very pleasant way of accounting for the downfall of the Southern Confederacy, by simply ascribing it to the great superiourity of the North in numbers and resources. This argument has had a great career in the newspapers and in small publications; and the vulgar mind is easily imposed upon by the statistical parallel and the arithmetical statement, inclined as it is to limit its comprehension of great historical problems to mere material views of the question. We shall give this argument the benefit of all it contains, and state it in its full force. Thus, it is correctly said that official reports in Washington show that there were called into the Federal service from the Northern States 2,656,553 men during the war, and that this number is quite one-third as many as all the white men, women, and children of the Southern States. Again, the figures in the War Department at Washington show that on the 1st of May, 1865, the military force of the North was 1,000,516 men of all arms; while the paroles taken in the Confederacy officially and conclusively show that the whole number of men within its limits under arms was exactly 174,223. Thus, it is said, putting the number 1,000,516 against 174,223, and taking into account the superiourity of the North in war materiel, there is sufficient reason for the failure of the Confederate cause without looking for another.

This explanation of failure is of course agreeable to the Southern people. But the historical judgment rejects it, discovers the fallacy, and will not refuse to point it out. It is simply to be observed that the disparity of military force, as between North and South stated above, is not the natural one; and that the fact of only 174,223 Confederates being under arms in the last period of the war was the result of mal-administration, the defective execution of the conscription law, the decay of the volunteer spirit, the unpopularity of the war, and that these are the causes which lie beyond this arithmetical inequality, which, in fact, produced the greater part of it, and which must be held responsible in the explanation. The