Prisoners.

all drafting and recruiting in the loyal states," (April 13.) This was the same as to declare the war ended; and so it proved. Mobile, after a severe siege, surrendered to General Canby on the 12th of April, and the same day General Wilson entered Montgomery, once the confederate capital. Johnston's army surrendered to Sherman on the 26th, and would have done so much sooner but for an effort to cover other than military objects. In the following month, (May,) Taylor and E. K. Smith surrendered their armies in the south-west to General Canby. The last hostility by land was an engagement near Palo Alto, in Texas, (May 13.) The last by sea was the burning of a whaling fleet, in the Northern Pacific, by the cruiser Shenandoah, (June 28.) We have reserved to the close some of the lights and shadows in the story of the war. Among the shadows, none fell farther than the treatment of the Union prisoners by their captors. There were difficulties in the way of exchanging prisoners, at first because the government shrank from so far acknowledging the insurgents as belligerents, and afterwards because the confederates would exchange white prisoners alone, claiming a right to deal with the blacks and their white officers as criminals, These delays would have been hard enough for the prisoners and their friends in any circumstances, but in those of the southern prisons they were heart-rending. At Richmond and elsewhere, in jails, warehouses, and covered railway bridges, at Andersonville and other places, in pens, - thousands upon thousands of Union prisoners were exposed to barbarities almost exceeding belief. "Terrible beyond description," are the words applied to the Richmond prisons in a report of a confederate congressional committee to the secretary of war, in September, 1862. "A reproach to us as a nation," reports a confederate adjutant and inspector-general to the same official, in

August, 1864, respecting Andersonville. A committee of the United States Sanitary Commission, after thorough inquiry, reported in September, 1864, that "tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison. This spectacle is daily beheld and allowed by the rebel government. The conclusion is unavoidable that these privations and sufferings have been designedly inflicted." According to the statistics of the war department, one hundred and twenty-six thousand nine hundred and fifty soldiers were taken prisoners, and twenty-two thousand five hundred and seventy of these died in prison. It was often proposed to retaliate upon confederate prisoners, but better counsels prevailed.

Sanitary

Nothing was brighter through these sad years and Chris- than the persevering devotion of the people to those tian Com- who fought their battles. Men had no sooner missions. sprung to arms than other men, and women in great number, began to minister to their wants and those of their families. Several Soldiers' Aid Societies were formed, and out of these grew the United States Sanitary Commission, or, as it was styled in the order from the secretary of war, "a commission of inquiry and advice in respect of the sanitary interests of the United States forces," (June 1861.) It was not to do what the government was doing, but rather to do what the government was leaving undone, and as there was a great deal of this, the Commission was kept busy. Its headquarters were in New York, its posts all over the loyal states, its members and work-people, men and women, in every camp and every hospital, watching the well, nursing the sick, transporting the wounded, protecting the discharged, supplying medicine, food, clothing, books, and even games along the Union lines. Another organization, the Christian Com

mission, was formed (November, 1861) with immediate reference to the spiritual wants of the soldiers; but its agents became as active as those of the Sanitary Commission in the relief of physical necessities. Side by side, the commissions distributed what the nation gave, all kinds of supplies and subscriptions in one steady stream, sometimes from a poor woman, sometimes from a man worth millions, in individual offerings, or in various combinations. Fairs in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were successful in raising the largest sums. At least thirty millions, in money and stores, passed through the agencies of the two Commissions.

Cost of

The pecuniary cost of the war to the government the war. and the loyal states, without counting a dollar expended by the confederates, could not have been less than five thousand millions. Indirectly it involved heavy losses in production and productive force, as every war has done; but these cannot be accurately estimated. The great cost of the war was personal- the death of thousands in battle, and hospital, and, after their discharge, of wounds or diseases contracted in service, and the pain and privation occasioned by their loss to thousands upon thousands more. Here was the real sacrifice, and in this the dying and the living shared. Yet few would have drawn back from it, had they the power; for, much as the war cost them, it repaid them with the sense of suffering in a great cause, and of contributing to great ends - the emancipation of four million slaves, the union of forty million freemen.

40

Difficulties.

CHAPTER XIV.

REUNION.

PEACE had its difficulties no less than war. The conquered were ready to confess their defeat, the conquerors to use their victory without abusing it. But here was a nation, split in two, to be reunited; here was a society, quivering with agitation, to be calmed. One great class -the slaveholding was broken up. Another-the slave was suddenly thrown from slavery into freedom. The whole people were accustomed to war, and to all its consequences, public and private. Civil authority had outgrown its old traditions. The president and his cabinet, Congress, the state and municipal governments, were in the habitual exercise of more or less arbitrary powers. Large appropriations and expenditures of money were too common to excite a healthful concern. Habits and ideas were every where changing, and not at once for the better. On the contrary, the high qualities which the danger of the country called out seemed sinking beneath the corruption and indifference which set in like a flood when the danger passed. In these circumstances, reunion was not only difficult; it might be impracticable, and many predicted that it would be.

Disarming.

The first obstacle in its way was removed by the disarming of the nation. In May, 1865, the army was more than a million strong. On the 22d and 23d of that month more than two hundred thousand soldiers

passed in review before the president, at Washington. Fresh from their great victories, they looked as if they could do what they pleased with their unarmed countrymen. Nor were they all. The thousands who manned the national fleets were equally strong in the position they had won. Yet all these numbers dwindled, all these armies and crews were disbanded with as much ease as if they had been vanquished instead of victorious. The secretary of war reported eight hundred thousand troops mustered out in six months, while material of every kind, stores, transports, railroads and their trains, telegraphs, were disposed of, and the army placed upon a peace footing. The same reduction was effected in the navy. Soldier or sailor, the volunteer disappeared in the citizen.

Freed

men.

The next obstacle to reunion could not be so rapidly removed. Three or four million freedmen were to be snatched from their former masters, or those who now threatened to master them, and trained to selfcontrol, before the nation to which they belonged could be properly considered as united. Just as the war was closing, Congress established in the war department a bureau of freedmen, refugees, and abandoned lands, to continue during the war, and one year thereafter, (March, 1865.) A commissioner, with an assistant for each state in insurrection and a number of clerks, was charged with all subjects relating to freedmen. Until the army was reduced so that it could no longer spare its officers, it supplied commissioners to the bureau. Their functions, originally, were to provide for the sick and needy, and to distribute abandoned lands among the freedmen; but few lands proved to be abandoned, and this part of the work fell through. Relief was administered in every possible form-food, clothing, shelter, and protection. When differences arose between freedmen and their employers, the commissioners served