The arts of peace were carried on in the North.  Towns and cities grew during the war.  Inventions were made in all kinds of machinery to increase the products of a day’s labor in the shop, and in the field.  In the South no opposition was allowed to the government which had been set up and which would have become real and respected if the rebellion had been successful.  No rear had to be protected.  All the troops in service could be brought to the front to contest every inch of ground threatened with invasion.  The press of the South, like the people who remained at home, were loyal to the Southern cause.

In the North, the country, the towns and the cities presented about the same appearance they do in time of peace.  The furnace was in blast, the shops were filled with workmen, the fields were cultivated, not only to supply the population of the North and the troops invading the South, but to ship abroad to pay a part of the expense of the war.  In the North the press was free up to the point of open treason.  The citizen could entertain his views and express them.  Troops were necessary in the Northern States to prevent prisoners from the Southern army being released by outside force, armed and set at large to destroy by fire our Northern cities.  Plans were formed by Northern and Southern citizens to burn our cities, to poison the water supplying them, to spread infection by importing clothing from infected regions, to blow up our river and lake steamers—­regardless of the destruction of innocent lives.  The copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes, and belittled those of the Union army.  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.  I know they did not.