It need hardly be said that despair was invading the remnant of the Confederacy; supplies began to run short in Richmond, recruiting had ceased, desertion was increasing.  Before the story of its long resistance closes it is better to face the gravest charge against the South.  That charge relates to the misery inflicted upon many thousands of Northern prisoners in certain prisons or detention camps of the South.  The alleged horrors were real and were great.  The details should not be commemorated, but it is right to observe that the pitiable condition in which the stricken survivors of this captivity returned, and the tale they had to tell, caused the bitterness which might be noted afterwards in some Northerners.  The guilt lay mainly with a few subordinate but uncontrolled officials.  In some degree it must have been shared by Jefferson Davis and his Administration, though a large allowance should be made for men so sorely driven.  But it affords no ground whatever, as more fortunate prisoners taken by the Confederates have sometimes testified, for any general imputation of cruelty against the Southern officers, soldiers, or people.  There is nothing in the record of the war which dishonours the South, nothing to restrain the tribute to its heroism which is due from a foreign writer, and which is irrepressible in the case of a writer who rejoices that the Confederacy failed.

4. The Second Election of Lincoln:  1864.

Having the general for whom he had long sought, Lincoln could now be in military matters little more than the most intelligent onlooker; he could maintain the attitude, congenial to him where he dealt with skilled men, that when he differed from them they probably knew better than he.  This was well, for in 1864 his political anxieties became greater than they had been since war declared itself at Fort Sumter.  Whole States which had belonged to the Confederacy were now securely held by the Union armies, and the difficult problem of their government was approaching its final settlement.  It seemed that the war should soon end; so the question of peace was pressed urgently.  Moreover, the election of a President was due in the autumn, and, strange as it is, the issue was to be whether, with victory in their grasp, the victors should themselves surrender.

It was not given to Lincoln after all to play a great part in the reconstruction of the South; that was reserved for much rougher and much weaker hands.  But the lines on which he had moved from the first are of interest.  West Virginia, with its solid Unionist population, was simply allowed to form itself into an ordinary new State.  But matters were not so simple where the Northern occupation was insecure, or where a tiny fraction of a State was held, or where a large part of the people leaned to the Confederacy.  Military governors were of course appointed; in Tennessee this position was given to a strong Unionist, Andrew