This text is part of:
[92] himself fortunate in being able to prove his devotion, without which he would have deserved death. He therefore went to enlist as a volunteer at the nearest recruiting-office; and, by a bitter irony of fortune, he would sometimes find himself enrolled in some such regiment as the Louisiana Tigers or the Mississippi Invincibles, names in singular contrast with his gloomy thoughts. A few executions and a considerable number of forced enlistments sufficed to crush out every expression of Union sentiments. Vigilance committees were formed in all the Southern States; and if they did not everywhere proceed to the extremes of violence, they everywhere trampled under foot all public and individual liberties, by resorting to search-warrants and other vexatious proceedings, which, by intimidating the weak and stimulating the irresolute, contributed to fill up the cadres of the volunteer regiments rapidly. The burden of the war was to fall exclusively upon the white population of those States which at the commencement of 1861 had set aside the Federal authority; this population, according to the census of 1860, amounted to 5,449,463 souls—or nearly five millions and a half—out of which number 690,000 men able to bear arms were to be raised. This last figure represents the total of all the forces that the Confederacy was at any time able to command. Owing to the social causes we have mentioned, and the conviction of every person who played a decided part, there were enlisted in the course of the year 1861 nearly 350,000 men; that is to say, more than one-half of the adult and eligible male population. This first effort of the South was, in proportion to her resources, much greater than that of the North; and the military power she displayed so rapidly, added to all the advantages of a defensive position, could not fail to give her a superiority at the outset of the war. But while the North, slow in making use of her resources, found in every disaster the occasion for increasing her army, which, by this means, was at the close of the war twice as large as it was at the beginning, the South was not in a condition to sustain the extraordinary effort she had made at the outset. Notwithstanding the idleness of her white population, which favored the adoption of military service, it was found necessary to resort to conscription
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.