depressed.  Their despondency increased with each returning day, and especially after the battle of Sailor’s Creek.  They threw away their arms in constantly increasing numbers, dropping out of the ranks and betaking themselves to the woods in the hope of reaching their homes.  I have already instanced the case of the entire disintegration of a regiment whose colonel I met at Farmville.  As a result of these and other influences, when Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox, there were only 28,356 officers and men left to be paroled, and many of these were without arms.  It was probably this latter fact which gave rise to the statement sometimes made, North and South, that Lee surrendered a smaller number of men than what the official figures show.  As a matter of official record, and in addition to the number paroled as given above, we captured between March 29th and the date of surrender 19,132 Confederates, to say nothing of Lee’s other losses, killed, wounded and missing, during the series of desperate conflicts which marked his headlong and determined flight.  The same record shows the number of cannon, including those at Appomattox, to have been 689 between the dates named.

There has always been a great conflict of opinion as to the number of troops engaged in every battle, or all important battles, fought between the sections, the South magnifying the number of Union troops engaged and belittling their own.  Northern writers have fallen, in many instances, into the same error.  I have often heard gentlemen, who were thoroughly loyal to the Union, speak of what a splendid fight the South had made and successfully continued for four years before yielding, with their twelve million of people against our twenty, and of the twelve four being colored slaves, non-combatants.  I will add to their argument.  We had many regiments of brave and loyal men who volunteered under great difficulty from the twelve million belonging to the South.

But the South had rebelled against the National government.  It was not bound by any constitutional restrictions.  The whole South was a military camp.  The occupation of the colored people was to furnish supplies for the army.  Conscription was resorted to early, and embraced every male from the age of eighteen to forty-five, excluding only those physically unfit to serve in the field, and the necessary number of civil officers of State and intended National government.  The old and physically disabled furnished a good portion of these.  The slaves, the non-combatants, one-third of the whole, were required to work in the field without regard to sex, and almost without regard to age.  Children from the age of eight years could and did handle the hoe; they were not much older when they began to hold the plough.  The four million of colored non-combatants were equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age and sex for sex, in supplying food from the soil to support armies.  Women did not work in the fields in the North, and children attended school.