The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 8: Soldier Life and Secret Service.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

‘ [136] had the blockade of the Southern ports been removed by us. . . . It was the blockade of your ports that killed the Southern Confederacy, not the action of the Northern armies.’ Compare with this mature opinion of the accomplished English soldier the words of Honorable Hugh McCulloch, one of Lincoln's Secretaries of the Treasury. ‘It was the blockade that isolated the Confederate States and caused their exhaustion. If the markets of Europe had been open to them for the sale of their cotton and tobacco, and the purchase of supplies for their armies, their subjugation would have been impossible. It was not by defeats in the field that the Confederates were overcome, but by the exhaustion resulting from their being shut up within their own domain, and compelled to rely upon themselves and their own production. Such was the devotion of the people to their cause, that the war would have been successfully maintained, if the blockade had not cut off all sources of supply and bankrupted their treasury.’ Again he says: ‘It must be admitted that the Union was not saved by the victories of its armies, but by the exhaustion of its enemies.’ Charles Francis Adams, in his oration on General Lee, vigorously maintains the same view, and Colonel Hilary A. Herbert, while Secretary of the Navy, delivered an elaborate address in 1896, in which he demonstrated the correctness of that interpretation of the true cause of the failure of the South.

In concluding, I may recall the well-known fact that the men in gray and the men in blue, facing each other before Petersburg, fraternized in those closing months of the great struggle. A Confederate officer, aghast at finding one night the trenches on his front deserted, discovered his men were all over in the Federal trenches, playing cards. The rank and file had made a truce till a certain hour!