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[6] men under their command. These little armies could live upon the country which they occupied. It was not always without difficulty, it is true; and the soldiers of Washington suffered cruelly during the winter they passed at Valley Forge. The English army, passing through a relatively rich country from Philadelphia to New York, was obliged to carry its provisions along with it; and Cornwallis lost all his baggage in North Carolina, even while he was making a conquering march through it. But neither of these had to depend upon that vast system of victualling which relies upon a fixed and certain base of operations, and without which large armies cannot be supported in America. They subsisted, marched, and sojourned for months by the side of an enemy who was master of the country.

If we wished to draw a comparison between the two wars, it would be the armies of the North, and not those of the South, that we should have to compare with the volunteers who freed America. The Confederate conscripts—impetuously brave, accustomed to obedience, and blindly following their chiefs, but individually without perseverance or tenacity—were men of different spirit, different habits, and different temperament; their character had been moulded by the aristocratic institutions founded upon slavery. The Federal volunteer, on the contrary, with his peculiarities and his defects, is the direct heir of those Continentals, as they were called, who, difficult to manage, badly organized, and almost always beaten notwithstanding their personal courage, ended, nevertheless, by defeating the English legions. He has, moreover, other claims to be considered their inheritor, for he can recall to mind the fact that it was the Northern States, then simple colonies, which sustained nearly all the brunt of the war of independence, the rewards of which they shared with their associates of the South. Out of the two hundred and thirty-two thousand men whom that war saw mustered under the Federal flag, Massachusetts alone, always the most patriotic and the most warlike, furnished sixty-eight thousand; Connecticut, with less population, thirty-two thousand; Pennsylvania, twenty-six thousand; New York, almost entirely occupied by the English, eighteen thousand; to sum up, the States which were faithful to the Union in 1861 had given one hundred and seventy-five thousand

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