Hush!  A light step, like a blown leaf:  the loose wooden latch rises at the touch of a familiar hand; familiar feet, that have trodden every inch of that poor log floor, lead the way; and then all at once, like a bundle of Chinese crackers, intermingled with shrieks and groans and deep, vehement curses, the rapid reports of pistols fill the chambers.  The beds, the floors, the walls, the doors are splashed with blood, and the chambers are cumbered with dead and dying men in dreadful agony.  Happy those who passed quietly from the sweet sleep of Nature to the deeper sleep of death!  Of thirty young men in the flush of youth, not one escaped.  Six Federal scouts had threaded their way since sunset from the Federal lines to do this horrible work.  Oh, Captain Jack, swart warrior of the Modocs! must we hang you for defending your lava-bed home in your own treacherous native way, when we, to preserve an arbitrary political relation, murder sleeping men in their beds?

Let me close with an incident of that great game of war in which the watershed of the Ohio was the gambler’s last stake.

The Confederacy was a failure in ’62, held together by external pressure of hostile armies.  It converted civil office into bomb-proofs for the unworthy by exempting State and Federal officials; it discouraged agriculture by levying on the corn and bacon of the small farmers, while the cotton and sugar of the rich planter were jealously protected; it discouraged enlistment by exempting from military service every man who owned twenty negroes, one hundred head of cattle, five hundred sheep—­in brief, all who could afford to serve; it discouraged trade by monopolies and tariffs.  But for the ubiquitous Jew it would have died in 1862-’63, as a man dies from stagnation of the blood.  It was the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.

This suicidal policy had its effect.  Cut off from all markets, the farmer planted only for family use.  At the close of the war the people of Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas had to be fed by the government.  The farmers in 1864 refused to feed the Southern army.  Seventy thousand men deserted east of the Mississippi between October 1, 1864, and February 3, 1865.  They were not recalled:  the government could not feed them.  The Confederacy was starved out by its own people—­rather by its own hideous misgovernment, for the people were loyal to the cause.

One fact was apparent as early as 1863:  the South would not feed the armies—­the North must.  That plan, so far as the Atlantic coast States were involved, was foiled at Gettysburg.  The only resource left was in the West, the watershed of the Ohio, which Sherman was wrenching out of General Johnston’s fingers.  In a military point of view, the great Confederate strategist was right:  he was conducting the campaign on the principle Lee so admirably adopted in Virginia.  But President Davis had more than a military question to solve.  If he could not seize the granaries of the watershed, the Confederacy would die of inanition.