It was, with a large following,
an auxiliary to the Confederate army. The North would have been much
stronger with a hundred thousand of these men in the Confederate ranks
and the rest of their kind thoroughly subdued, as the Union sentiment
was in the South, than we were as the battle was fought.
As I have said, the whole South was a military camp. The colored
people, four million in number, were submissive, and worked in the field
and took care of the families while the able-bodied white men were at
the front fighting for a cause destined to defeat. The cause was
popular, and was enthusiastically supported by the young men. The
conscription took all of them. Before the war was over, further
conscriptions took those between fourteen and eighteen years of age as
junior reserves, and those between forty-five and sixty as senior
reserves. It would have been an offence, directly after the war, and
perhaps it would be now, to ask any able-bodied man in the South, who
was between the ages of fourteen and sixty at any time during the war,
whether he had been in the Confederate army. He would assert that he
had, or account for his absence from the ranks. Under such
circumstances it is hard to conceive how the North showed such a
superiority of force in every battle fought.
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