Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/62

56 The cohesion of the States again was, we were told, to give way under this strain. It was impossible that such a Government could be revered far from its centre, or that the Union could have advantages enough to hold together its distant members under any severe pressure. Every day the West was about to part from the East, as well as the South from the North; and instead of one disruption, if the war went on, there were to be a dozen. Yet not only did the West remain firm and true; but remote California rivalled her sisters in loyalty and zeal for what to her also was the common cause.

The soldiers of the North were described as hirelings—Irish and Germans selling their blood for Yankee gold. In those vast hosts there were many foreigners, though foreigners who for the most part intended, unlike our German Legion in the Crimean war, to make the country which they served their home. There were also many soldiers of Irish and German extraction, as in the British armies there are many Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, not to mention Normans and other men of alien ancestry not a few. But that the mass were American husbandmen, woodsmen, and artisans, the world must begin to believe, now that it sees them return to the plough, the axe, the workshop, and the loom. The armies of the South were raised, after the first year at least, by the most sweeping conscriptions, in which utter disregard was shown for public faith; men who had voluntarily enlisted for a year being voted in for a longer term, and at last to the end of the war. Those of the North were raised in a great measure, as the armies of European monarchies are entirely raised, by the inducement of pay; and the usual evils of recruiting, crimping, and trepanning, did not fail to attend the process when the