Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[98] safe. In fine, they carried into the war more passion than their adversaries; the Federals to them were invaders who had always been painted in the blackest colors, and who, in coming to free the negroes, intended to make them the equals of the common whites, and consequently to humble the jealous caste to which those whites belonged.

On the other hand, the Confederate soldier was inferior, in point of intelligence and information, to that of the North. Southern society being divided into very distinct classes, the élite of the population only were cultivated; the rest had no education whatever. While primary schools were universal in the North, profound ignorance reigned among most of the inhabitants of the slave States. This difference, which the census tables of 1860 exhibit in a striking manner, had a great bearing on the issues of the conflict; for the nations that are really strong are not those which possess a few distinguished men, but those in which the moral and intellectual standard of the greatest number is most elevated. In the knapsacks of the Confederate soldiers there were found more playing-cards than books or writing materials, while the use of strong drinks was much more prevalent among them than among those of the North. Whether this vice was more congenial to their tastes, or whether it was deemed expedient to tolerate it as a kind of compensation for all their privations, the Confederate officers were unable strictly to enforce the rules which prohibited the use of spirituous liquors among their troops. Nor did the Southern armies have in their ranks any of those artisans skilled in all the mechanical trades that were to be found in the armies of the North, whose craft enabled every Federal regiment to supply the necessary men for the reconstruction of railroads, the repairing of locomotives, or for running a train; so that the Confederates were more than once under the necessity of applying to Northern men, forcibly enlisted, for this kind of service, or of confiding the task to their own officers, whose inexperience cost them dear. To the common whites, in short, taught to despise every kind of manual labor, the soldier's trade was, what used to be called formerly, a noble profession, and they felt degraded when called upon to handle the shovel. They often refused to work in those trenches which played such a conspicuous part