in their refusal to abandon the independence of the Confederacy. "I can have no common country with the Yankees," said Davis. "My life is bound up with the Confederacy. If any man supposes that under any circumstances I can be an agent of the reconstruction of the Union, he mistakes every element of my nature. With the Confederacy I will live or die." Lee told his soldiers in a proclamation that their choice was between "war and abject submission." Yet both these men lived to be reconciled to the United States of America, and Davis at the close of his history of the Confederacy wrote of the Union, "Esto perpetua!" The Southern leaders in the spring of 1865 utterly misunderstood Lincoln's conciliatory spirit. They used such phrases as "abject submission," "subjugation," "our arrogant foe," when arrogance or revenge was as far from Lincoln's thoughts as the east is from the west. His beautiful second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, breathed only magnanimity in his deep longing for a just, kindly, and lasting peace for the war-torn country, "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Yet it is not strange that the deeds of Sherman spoke more loudly to the South than the words of Lincoln. The general, after a brief stay in the city of Savannah, began his march northward through the Carolinas—a march which he calls in his "Memoirs" "ten times as important" as his famous march through Georgia. Among officers and men there was much resentment against South Carolina, as the state responsible for the war. Columbia, the state capital, was burned the morning the Union troops entered the city (February 19). Although the responsibility for the conflagration has not been fixed to this day, and evidence points strongly to its origin in burning cotton fired by the townspeople themselves, Sherman was charged with the deed as the culmination of his policy of vandalism. It is in the light of the flames of Columbia that the reply of the South to Lincoln's terms of peace must be read.

Grant renewed active operations against Petersburg late in March. His army of 116,000 men gradually closed in upon Lee's force of less than half that number. On Sunday, April 2,

a messenger from Lee brought to President Davis, as he sat at worship in St. Paul's church, the warning that Richmond must be evacuated. The Confederate government left the city that night for Danville, and the next day Union troops entered, their bands playing "Rally round the Flag, Boys!" Lee tried to get his army to the hilly land of western Virginia, where he believed that he could maintain a defensive warfare for many months to come, but Sheridan's cavalry, spreading out along the Appomattox valley, headed him off, defeating his hungry, exhausted soldiers at Five Forks and bringing him to the bitter decision of surrender. Grant and Lee met at the McLean farm at Appomattox Court House, April 9. After a few minutes of friendly conversation recalling their old days of comradeship in the Mexican War, Grant drew up to a table and wrote out in a few sentences the liberal terms of surrender. All that was asked was that the soldiers should lay down their arms and return to their allegiance to the Union. The officers were allowed to retain their mounts and side arms, and the cavalry and artillerymen, at Lee's request, were permitted to keep their own horses, "to work their farms," as Grant said with his wonderful simplicity. Lee immediately signed the terms, with a gracious acknowledgment of their generosity.

The Army of Virginia had been the mainstay of the Confederacy. With Lee's surrender the submission of the other armies was only a matter of days. The surrender of Johnston to Sherman at Raleigh, North Carolina (April 26),1 and of "Dick" Taylor's forces east of the Mississippi and Kirby Smith's west of the river to Canby (May 4 and 26 respectively) brought the end of armed resistance to the authority of the United States. Nearly 175,000 Confederate soldiers laid down their arms in those spring weeks of 1865 and returned to their

1On April 18 Sherman had entered into an agreement with Johnston, securing the promise of the surrender of all the Confederate troops to the Rio Grande in return for political engagements as to the treatment of the seceded states. Sherman transcended his competence as a military commander in discussing these political matters, and his arrangements were promptly disavowed by the government at Washington. However, his intentions were good, and the harsh censure meted out to him by Stanton was unkind if not undeserved.

plantations and homes to begin the long task of repairing the ravages of war. They had fought a valiant fight. The courage of the men and the self-sacrificing devotion of the women remain a cherished tradition in Dixie Land. But there are few, if any, of the children of those who fought for the "lost cause" who would wish today that the outcome of the Civil War had been different-none who would not now echo the final benediction of Jefferson Davis on our common Union: "Esto perpetua !"

GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE IN WAR TIME

"In the clash of arms the laws are silent" runs the old Roman proverb. War tends inevitably to increase the power of the executive arm of government, even in democracies. Quick decision, unity of plan, efficiency in action, are the conditions of military success, which ill tolerates the slow deliberations of a legislative body or that insistence on the right of free expression of opinion which is cherished as a fundamental liberty by self-governing peoples. The United States and the Confederate States of America proved no exception to this general rule in the Civil War.

From the fall of Fort Sumter to the meeting of the extra session of Congress nearly three months later, Abraham Lincoln was virtually a "dictator." By executive proclamation he increased the regular army and navy of the United States by some 40,000 men, although he had no constitutional right to add a single man to a regiment or a ship. He proclaimed a blockade of the ports of the cotton states and threatened with the fate of pirates anyone who should molest the commerce of the United States, although a blockade is an incident of war and war had been neither declared nor recognized. He authorized General Scott to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus and make military arrests anywhere on the line between Philadelphia and Washington, although the right to suspend the writ is enumerated among the powers of Congress in the Constitution (Art. I, sect. 9, par. 2), and a decision of Chief Justice Marshall at the

time of the Burr conspiracy had denied it to the executive. When Congress met on July 4, Lincoln confessed the unconstitutionality of his proclamations, which, he said, "were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity." Congress promptly and enthusiastically ratified his actions. A "higher law" had superseded the Constitution— the law of self-preservation. Throughout the war Congress coöperated with the President, conferring on him the power to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wherever he deemed it necessary and allowing him great freedom in the interpretation and execution of its acts.

The administration at Washington was hardly consistent in its attitude toward the South. Lincoln held to the theory that the seceding states had not left the Union and could not leave the Union, but that groups of men in them, too numerous and powerful to be dealt with by the civil authorities, were in insurrection against the United States. To recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent power would be virtually to concede that it was another "nation," and yet to treat the Confederate armies and navies merely as masses of individual "traitors" would have been impossible and ridiculous.' Therefore, while maintaining its claim to sovereignty over the citizens of the seceding states (as shown, for example, by the Nonintercourse Act of July 13, 1861, the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the exemption of parts of the slaveholding states from the application of the Emancipation Proclamation), the government at Washington virtually recognized the sovereignty of the Confederacy over the same citizens by according them the status of a belligerent power, with exchanges of prisoners, paroles, and the reception of overtures for peace. It was inconsistency-but the alternative would have been rank inhumanity.

1The dilemma was presented in the autumn of 1861, when the crew of the privateer Savannah were brought as captives into New York Harbor. The men were convicted of piracy, in accord with Lincoln's proclamation of blockade. But when President Davis, invoking the lex talionis, threatened to treat an equal number of Union prisoners in the same way as these men were treated, the sentence was never carried out.

The policy of the government in regard to slavery was revolutionized by the war. On the day after the battle of Bull Run both Houses of Congress, in accord with the Republican platform and Lincoln's repeated statements, passed a resolution that "this war is not waged . . . in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [seceded] states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease." But when it appeared that the slaves were employed in the Confederate army, driving munition wagons, cooking in the camps, and digging at the trenches and fortifications, a Confiscation Act was passed (August 6) declaring such of them as "were required or permitted to work in or upon any fort, navy yard, dock, armory, ship, or intrenchment against the lawful authority of the United States," to be forfeited. This act did not go far enough for those who believed that, since slavery was the cause of the war, the extermination of slavery should be the first object of the war. General Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, issued a proclamation (August 31) emancipating the slaves of all persons in Missouri in rebellion against the United States, but Lincoln ordered him to modify the proclamation to accord with the Confiscation Act. The President's great desire was to win the border states to a policy of compensated emancipation, and to that end he secured the passage of a bill in April, 1862, offering to loyal slaveholders a maximum of $300 for each slave. On July 14 he summoned the members of Congress from the border states to the White House to urge them in person to accept this offer,

1A similar proclamation by General Hunter of the Department of the South, nine months later, emancipated the slaves in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln repudiated this order too, declaring that he must reserve to himself the responsibility of setting the slaves free in any state, in his capacity as commander in chief of the army and navy.