Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/293

Rh sacrifice their lives and their property, and with which they had endured privations, hardships, and other trials not surpassed by any people in history. But while this was the case, they felt that they had borne themselves honorably and as a brave people, believing that they were right in the great struggle through which they had passed. All that they had left after that struggle were their integrity, their honor, and their deep-seated love for the American form of government. They were incapable of doing anything which would throw dishonor on their record, or of taking any action by which they would stultify themselves as to that record. They were in the frame of mind to patiently await the action of the United States government in restoring them to the places they had formerly occupied among the States of the Union before the war. They hoped that they would be treated generously, and they determined to submit to any reasonable demand made on them by the victorious North. They knew that they would have to accept what was meted out to them, whether it was good or bad, whether it was generous or ungenerous, as they were utterly incapable of resorting to arms again.

The status of the seceded States immediately after the war, politically, was as follows: The States of Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and Florida had governments organized under their respective constitutions which they had in 1861. Tennessee, Arkansas (spring, 1864), and Louisiana (spring, 1864) were under bogus governments, organized and sustained by the military forces of the United States, not by the free will of its citizens. The States of Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky had never seceded regularly from the Union, and their State governments were quickly subdued and controlled by troops of the United States, and, because a large portion of the citizens of those States sympathized with the South, were held under strict surveillance during the entire war.