Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/85

Rh thorough believer in State rights, but was opposed to secession and in favor of employing every right and proper expedient for averting or postponing it. His diary of the secret meetings and discussions of Mr. Buchanan s cabinet, during November, 1860, shows how averse he was to what he regarded the unwise and precipitate action of South Carolina. He addressed himself with great assiduity to the task of repressing the disposition manifested by the Southern States to take forcible possession of the forts and arsenals within their limits, and just prior to the time alleged for his distribution of public arms for aiding the secession movement he had published, in a Richmond paper, a letter which gained him high credit at the North for his boldness in rebuking the pernicious views of many in his own state. (Pollard’s Lee and His Lieutenants, pp. 790-796, and Administration of Buchanan, p. 220.)

It may not be impossible that this persistent perversion of history is intended to shield the North from any reproach that might attach to her because of inability, with her immense superiority of military resources, to make an early conquest of the South. Besides the enormous means at her command in aid of commissary, quartermaster and ordnance departments, the North recruited her largely preponderant armies by purchased &quot;Hessians&quot; from Europe, by enlistment of negroes, and by pecuniary stimulants for substitutes or volunteers offered by individuals and towns and states and the general government. The frauds practiced on the poor negroes in enlistments, in withholding bounties, in misapplication of what had been accumulated under orders of Butler and other generals, constitute a dark chapter in the mysterious history of the freedmen s bureau and in other unrecorded occurrences of the war. In 1870 was published the report of the commissioners on equalization of the municipal war debts by the general assembly of Maine. It contains curious and disgraceful matters of history in regard to