Facing Defeat

By the summer of 1863 serious doubt of the successful establishment of Southern independence began to gain ground among the masses of the Southern people; and a lukewarraness first, and next a feeling almost of disaffection to the Confederate Government and cause widely prevailed. This indifference was very unlike the strange absence of anxiety and solicitude about the result of the war, which characterized its early stages. The latter feeling proceeded from a blind and overweening confidence, and those who entertained it were not the less intensely patriotic and devoted to the cause. Nor was this species of disaffection, which began to influence so many, characterized by the slightest tendency toward treachery or renegadeism.

Hundreds of citizens, who were fiercely opposed to the administration, and cordially disliked Mr. Davis, who had even lost much of their interest in the Confederate army and its fortunes, nevertheless hated the Northern people, the Federal Government, and the invading army, with a hatred immeasurably more thorough, rabid, and ineradicable, than at the beginning of the war, ere they knewpraetically what invasion was like. With a strange inconsistency, these men would have done any thing to have injured the enemy, even when adverse to making further sacrifices for the benefit of the Confederacy. So far from renegading and pandering the Federal rule, the large majority of this class would have pawned their souls for power to crush the Federal arms.

Still it took two years more of disaster - of an invasion which probed every nook and corner of the South, and a condition of almost famine, to finally break the spirit of the Southern people, and make them, in the abjectness of their agony, actually weleome a peace which heralded subjugation as a relief from the horrors of war. It was the submission of the people which took the steel out of the army.

The end of the war was in sight when Lincoln was re-elected, and when he was inaugurated for the second time, the exact manner of the collapse of the Confederacy was the only uncertainty. The war in the East had become an actual siege of Richmond, with only one termination possible. In the West, the armies were still advancing, and were to continue their progress until Lee and Johnston should be seized, as it were by a gigantic pair of tongs, Grant on one claw, Sherman on the other. The sooner every southerner was taught that the war could not succeed, and that its continuance meant personal ruin, as well as ultimate defeat, the sooner Lee and Johnston's armies would melt away.

In such a campaign it is not strange that private property was not always safe. Food and stock were fair prey; money, silver, trinkets, ought to have been let alone, and Sherman's orders gave no countenance to thefts of these. But with an army of hilarious boys, as most of the " vetreans " yet were, operating in the enemy's country, with the irrepressible love of souvenirs that still marks the American youth, a nice and proper discrimination between materials of war and private property could not be maintained. On December 13, Sherman reached the sea. The populace suffered, and Sherman's name is still a mark for southern execration.

Early in 1865, Lee could see what Davis would not admit, that the fall of Petersburg and Richmond was only a matter of time. In desperation, they both listened to the astute Benjamin, secretary of state, who advised that slavery be abolished as a means of securing European aid, and that the negroes be armed to fight for independence. Lee advised that Richmond be abandoned, and that the government take refuge in the Blue Ridge, beyond Lynchburg, where a handful of troops could cover the mountain passes and maintain a resistance for an indefinite period. Neither of these plans was acted upon. On April 7, Grant had shifted "the responsibility of any further effusion of blood" by calling upon Lee to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia. On the 9th, the generals met in a residence near Appomattox Court House.