William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[571] people of the South had ceased to desire the triumph of secession; but they had ceased any longer to be capable of those efforts failing which success is out of the question. It will be for the philosophical historian, unravelling the intricate web of cause and effect, to trace the reasons of this decline in the moral energy of the South: it is enough here to mark the result as it influenced the fortunes of the armies in the field.

General Grant, during the winter of 1864, expressed in a strong figure the belief that the fighting population of the Confederacy was exhausted. ‘They have,’ said he, ‘robbed the cradle and the grave.’ But this statement overshot the reality. The South did not so much lack men as the men lacked interest in the war. The conscription then became odious, and evasion universal, while those who wished to escape military service readily found those at home willing to open their ranks, let them slip through, and close up behind them. It finally came about that men enough to form three armies of the strength of Lee's lay perdu, beyond the power of recovery of the Richmond authorities. To this must be added the fact that a prodigious number of Confederate troops —probably as many as were in the ranks of both Lee and Johnston—were, during the last eighteen months of the war, kept out of the field by being retained as prisoners at the North under a fixed determination of General Grant not to exchange them—a measure that was certainly an effectual agency in the lieutenant-general's avowed plan of ‘hammering continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources until by mere attrition, if by no other way, there should be nothing left to him.’

While the conscription system had thus hopelessly broken down, the collapse of the Confederate commissariat was equally complete. And here, again, it was not that the South lacked resources, for the granaries of that vast and fertile territory bulged with great store of corn; but maladministra-tion rendered these riches as vain as if the South had been a Sahara. That great department of administrative service charged with the feeding of the troops, was presided over by