CHAPTER XI.

DISBANDING THE GREAT ARMY-THE SOUTH, ITS GENERALS, MEN, MONEY, AND MANAGEMENT OF THE WAR-JEFFERSON DAVIS-STARTING THE WORK OF RECONSTRUCTION - PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S SENTIMENTS, THEORIES, AND PLANS.

OWARD the close of May, 1865, preparations

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began to be made for mustering out of service the grand army of the Republic. No such army had been organized in modern times, and none so thoroughly and powerfully equipped in the history of the world, and it became a question in Europe as to what disposition could be made of this vast force; but no such question disturbed the people of this country. The army was composed, mainly, of citizens, men of families and homes, who had been fighting for their principles and country, and when they had won their cause, they were ready to return with joy to their former avocations. In the sight of monarchic Europe the dispersion of this vast army presented a grand moral spectacle difficult to be contemplated; but the work was soon done. In a day the victorious army melted away, and became a thing of the past. To the Government it left a burden and a task, the work of many years. To heal the wounds of such a conflict was a difficult undertaking. To

care for the widow and orphan; to lift those the war had crushed, or made helpless; to reconstruct and reinvigorate exhausted and anarchic communities; and provide for the stupendous debt which a foolish and wicked Rebellion had made necessary, now became the cheerless and difficult task of the Government. In doing this work it was not to be expected there would be no mistakes. There had been errors in the conduct of the war, when men were most united for a great, common purpose; but now, when every imaginable and possible interest and passion would be involved, the case became appalling.

A page may here not inappropriately, perhaps, be devoted to a mere glance at the conduct and final collapse of the "Confederacy." In the first In the first year of the Rebellion, and especially at its outset, many of the most able men of the South entered what was termed the "Congress" and took part in the "government." But when the war had fairly begun, a new field was opened for ambition, and most of these men were struck with a desire for military glory. They entered the army. And how many of these politicians became soldiers? And where now is the glory obtained in fighting in such a cause? Its very mention is a source of ridicule or contempt in the greater part of the world.

The rebel "Congress" was soon passed over, mainly, to an inferior class of men, mostly unknown in the politics of the country. Lazy, unwise, and quarrelsome, they constituted, perhaps, the most incompetent and unworthy body of men who had ever assembled

in a legislative capacity on the continent. The will of Mr. Davis became the will of the legislature, and the government became the one-man power of which the political charlatanry of the country had ever cried. The Rebellion had been founded upon two utterly false political pretensions, State Rights and Secession, but the rebel leaders soon lost sight of these, or found them entirely impracticable. Such a thing as secession among the States engaged in the Rebellion was resisted, and even the discussion of the subject put down; and the rights of the States, in the sense of the State-Rights dogma, were utterly crushed out. The pretended friends and patrons of these theories set out at once to suppress them among themselves; and the government to be established on them, with slavery as its corner-stone, became a weak, distracted despotism.

By the winter of 1863, Mr. Davis says, the currency of the Confederacy in circulation amounted to three times the demand of the business of the country, and the effect of inflation was very apparent on the morals of the people. The rebel foreign debt at the close of the war was very considerable, made chiefly in London and Paris, and beginning in 1863. This loan was based solely on cotton seven per cent bonds, which were to be redeemed in cotton at a low designated rate, or in forty half-yearly coin payments. But this was not the only loss France and England suffered by their avaricious folly and wickedness.

No such a miserable financial fabrication was ever erected by men claiming sanity and intelligence as

that of the "Confederacy." Still, as in everything else, its monetary pretensions were monstrous. On the last Sunday of the "Lost Cause" in Richmond, the "Confederate Currency" was thrown on the streets broadcast, and trampled under the feet of the people who had used it. It had never been worth anything, and now they knew it was chaff. But down at Danville or Charlotte, Mr. Davis caused a bank to be opened by his treasurer and he there began fooling with this trash again. Confidence was to be re-established he said. The little chest was opened, and the people invited to come up, and the "government" would redeem its obligations by paying them one dollar in silver for seventy in its "currency," which may have fallen into their hands. The "government," he said, was still strong. There could be no better demonstration of the fact! When the "government," that is, Mr. Davis, moved on, he ceremoniously assigned thirty or forty thousand dollars, about all left of this silver, to General Johnston. It was to be a "military chest" for defraying the expenses of further prosecuting the war. was, indeed, the day of small things and small men in the South. At its best that section had never had any financiers, and during the Rebellion it exhibited its utter inability to grapple with the question of money. The legislation of the Rebellion showed an almost entire lack of anything like statesmanship, and the only spirit of any kind manifested in the last days was in the disposition to quarrel with Jefferson Davis.

This

Nor were military affairs much better in the South. Its able men, its chivalry, rushed out to gain a little glory in a conflict they would make very brief. But harmony was utterly wanting among them from first to last; and their soldierly qualities were seldom equal to their ambitious and loud pretensions. Still the South had many brave, and not a few quite able, soldiers, besides Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, and James Longstreet.

Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee have been eulogized as standing at the head; or, indeed, far above the head, of all the rebel military chiefs; and among most of those who were engaged in the Rebellion, with their descendants, General Lee is held up as the model soldier of his age. Neither General Johnston's military career, nor his "Narrative" of it, shows him to have been a successful or a great soldier.

General Lee was considered notoriously faulty at the outset by the Southern people, and what they understood as his utter failure in West Virginia, was generally censured. No soldier ever had a better opportunity to gain renown or to strike for his cause than he had in the Peninsular or Chickahominy campaign of the slow, doubtful, and ever unready McClellan. He failed almost utterly in that campaign, only preventing McClellan from taking Richmond, which he could not have done if a more energetic soldier had been at the head of the Union army. He allowed McClellan's army to beat him badly at