A serious inconvenience was immediately felt in the lack of a circulating medium. The Confederate currency was at once made worthless by the failure of the rebellion, and there was nothing to take its place. The extent to which its depreciation had gone was amusingly shown by a printed notice and list of prices I found posted in a country tavern, already some months old. In it the price of a dinner was put at ten dollars, and other meals and accommodation in proportion. Still this currency had served for business purposes, and it being gone, the community had to go back for the time to primitive barter.
We had opportunity to notice to what great straits the people had been reduced for two years in the matter of manufactured goods of all kinds. Factories of every sort were scarce in the South when the war began, and resources of every kind were so absorbed in the war that there was no chance for new ones to spring up. Carriages, wagons, and farm implements went to decay, or could only be rudely patched up by the rough mechanics of the plantation. The stringent blockade shut out foreign goods, and the people were generally clothed in homespun. In many houses the floors were bare because the carpets had been cut up to make blankets for the soldiers. Ladies made their own shoes of such materials as they could find. They braided their own hats. They showed a wonderful ingenuity in supplying from native products the place of all the articles of use which had formerly been imported from foreign lands or from the North. Taste asserted itself, perhaps all the more in such discouraging circumstances, and feminine refinement and love of adornment worked marvels out of the slenderest materials. A home-made straw hat ornamented with feathers of barnyard fowls and domestic birds was often as jaunty and as pretty as any Parisian bonnet. Simple dyes were made to give to coarse cotton stuffs a lively contrast or harmony of pure colors as effective as the varied and elaborate fabrics from the European looms. In some respects this self-dependence heightened the personal advantages of those who excelled in ingenuity, in taste, and in skill; for the clothes indicated better the character of the wearer than those which are made on one pattern in the shop of a fashionable mantua-maker.
Adversity has such uses and such compensations that I should hardly reckon the poverty of the Southern States during 1864-65 as a burden greatly felt in private life. All such things are comparative, and where all the people undergo the same privations, the odious comparisons and jealousies between richer and poorer disappear in a measure. A simple life full of great enthusiasms is one a philosopher may find much satisfaction in, and has, many a time, been pictured as an ideal calculated to bring out the best qualities of men and women and therefore to make life more truly enjoyable. I greatly doubt if Southern people, in looking back on the war time, find anything to regret in the simple fare and plain dress of the enforced economy of that period. The real griefs and burdens, if I am not mistaken, came from other sources. Among thoughtful people there must have been from the summer of 1863 serious doubts of the possibility of a successful outcome of their struggle, and a growing and unhappy conviction that the fearful waste of life and treasure would be in vain. They must have had grave misgivings also as to the righteousness of a cause which championed an institution condemned by the whole world and in conflict with the general progress of Christendom. To see their best and bravest consumed in the fire of successive battles, and to be waiting only till the slaughter should make it impossible to keep armies in the field, must have been a grief and a suffering which made all physical deprivations seem small indeed.
I think I cannot be mistaken in the judgment I formed at the time, that to the great body of the Southern people it was a relief that the struggle was really over; that they breathed more freely and felt that a new lease of life came with peace. They had been half conscious for a good while that it must end so, and they were in the mood to be at least resigned, if not readily to profess the pious conviction that "it was all for the best." With the reactions and political exasperations that came later, I have here nothing to do. My purpose has been to reproduce, as far as my memory serves, the scenes and the surroundings of that last military duty of the great war. Why it was that the mellowness of spirit which seemed then so prevalent could not have ripened without interruption or check into a quicker and more complete fraternization, belongs to another field of inquiry. The military chronicler stops where he was mustered out.
A summer ride which a party of us took to the battlefield of "Guilford-Old-Court-House" may be worth noting as an encouragement to believe that our descriptions of the scenes of our own engagements need not become unintelligible even in the distant future. Among the combats of our Revolutionary War, Guilford Court House ranks high in importance; for the check there given to the invading British army under Lord Cornwallis by the Continental forces under General Greene was the turning-point in a campaign. Greensborough is the present county-seat of Guilford County, and the "Old Court House," a few miles distant, has disappeared as a village, a few buildings almost unused being the only mark of the old town. Natural topography, however, does not change its material features easily, and in this case a cleared field or two where the forest had formerly extended seemed to be the only change that had occurred in the past century. With General Greene's official report of the battle in our hands, we could trace with complete accuracy every movement of the advancing enemy and his own dispositions to receive the attack. We could see the reasons for the movements on both sides, and how the undulations of surface and the cover of woods and fences were taken advantage of by either commander. Military principles being the same in all times, we found ourselves criticising the movements as if they had occurred on one of our own recent battlefields. It brought the older and the later war into almost startling nearness, and made us realize, as perhaps nothing else could have done, how the future visitor will trace the movements in which we have had a part; and when we have been dust for centuries, will follow the path of our battalions from hill to hill, from stream to stream, from the border of a wood to the open ground where the bloody conflict was hand to hand, and will comment upon the history we have made. It pointed the lesson that what is accurate in our reports and narratives will be recognized by the intelligent critic, and that the face of the country itself will be an unalterable record which will go far to expose the true reasons of things,--to show what statements are consistent with the physical conditions under which a battle was fought, and what, if any, are warped to hide a repulse or to claim a false success. Nature herself will thus prove the strongest ally of truth.
NOTE.--General Cox was the spontaneous choice of the "Union Party" of Ohio for Governor, and was nominated at its Convention held in Columbus, June 21,1865, while he was still engaged in his military duties in North Carolina. At a ratification meeting, held in the evening after the Convention, Senator Sherman said, speaking of the ticket: "It is headed by a gentleman who is not only a soldier, but a statesman and scholar,--a man of the highest and purest character,--a man who, in all the walks of life, will be a model for us all. I thank you for that nomination,--although I believe the people made it before the Convention met." At a reception in honor of General Sherman given in Columbus, July 13, 1865, the general himself was called on to speak. After mentioning Grant, whose fame was secure, and McPherson, his beloved companion in arms, he said: "And here is General Cox, who is your candidate for Governor,--a man who did his whole duty from first to last and did it well and will do it to the end."
General Cox was elected by a handsome majority, served one term, returned to the practice of the law, and in 1869 was appointed Secretary of the Interior, by General Grant. Retiring to private life at the end of twenty months, he occupied many positions of trust and honor: President of the Toledo and Wabash Railroad, Member of Congress from the Toledo District, President of the Cincinnati University, Dean of the Cincinnati Law School, etc. His reading was extensive; his scholarship profound. In microscopic research he attained world-wide distinction and he received the Gold Medal of Honor at the Antwerp Exposition of 1891, for excellence in micro-photography.
He was thrice honored with the degree of LL.D., the last time by Yale College, in June, 1877. As an indication of the esteem in which he was held by those among whom he went as an armed invader, it should be mentioned that one of the degrees was conferred by the University of North Carolina, in June, 1870.
He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Royal Microscopical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, the Cobden Club, and a number of others.
His contributions to the magazines, historical, literary, and scientific, were numerous, and his series of critical and biographical reviews in "The Nation," from the beginning of its publication to the summer of 1900, constitutes a most valuable and interesting commentary on public men and affairs and military operations at home and abroad.