Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/306

 306 Southern Historical Society Papers.

the seas ? Do not seek to account for it without resort to something higher than mere physical courage and ordinary endurance; for if you do, the facts and figures of recorded history will overwhelm you. Listen to some of these :

More than half as many men were enrolled in the Union army as the entire white population of the Southern States proper, including all the women and the children.

The records show that more than two million eight hundred and fifty thousand troops were furnished the Union army by the States, and while, for lack of official data, I cannot state to a man the enlist- ments in the Southern army from first to last, the estimate has the sanction of high authority deemed reliable that the Confederate forces available for action during the entire war did not exceed six hundred thousand soldiers, of whom there were not more than two hundred thousand arms-bearing men at any one time, and when the war closed half that number covered the whole effective force of all arms in all quarters of the Confederacy.

Besides the disparity in the land forces there was the Federal navy, the gunboats and the ironclads, without which many believe Grant's army would have been lost at Shiloh and McClellan's on the Peninsula.

When the Union army was dissolved four hundred thousand more men were borne upon its rolls than the estimated number of available enlistments in the Southern army from the spring of 1861 to the spring of 1865, and during that time' there had been two hundred and seventy thousand Federal prisoners captured.

But this enumeration need not be extended. The battle-fields, which are the burying grounds of our " unreturning dead," attest the resolution of the weaker side, and the eighty-two beautiful national cemeteries, where more than three hundred thousand Union soldiers are interred, illustrate the fierceness of the fiery struggle.

The odds of which the figures tell to which I have adverted do not present in their best light the constancy and devotion of the soldiers of the South.

For proof of this see the troops of one State, whose territory must be uncovered to save some other point, leave family and home defenceless, to fall within hostile lines behind them, and march cheer- fully, though footsore and weary, half clad and often hungry, to other fields to defend the soil of other States, when if they had chosen the alternative of desertion charity would have palliated their crime. But if you seek for that which most won the homage of the world