CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
While neither in itself—perhaps not the combination of the two—was final and conclusive, the beginning of the end of the Confederacy may be dated from the loss of Vicksburg and the simultaneous retreat from Gettysburg. For these two disasters made all classes consider more deeply, both their inducing causes and the final results that must follow a succession of such crushing blows.
There can be little doubt that a complete victory at Gettysburg, vigorously followed up, would have ended the war; and the generally-accepted belief in the South was that the exhaustive defeat was proportionately bad. The war had been going on two years and a half. Every device had been used to put the whole numerical strength of the country into the field and to utilize its every resource. The South had succeeded to a degree that stupefied the outside world and astonished even herself. But the effort had exhausted, and left her unfit to renew it. Over and again the armies of the East and West had been re-enforced, reorganized and re-equipped—and ever came the heavy, relentless blows of the seemingly-exhaustless power, struggled against so vainly. The South had inflicted heavy loss in men, material and prestige; but she wasted her strength in these blows, while unhappily she could not make them effective by quick repetition.
The people, too, had lost their early faith in the Government. They had submitted to the most stringent levy of conscription and impressment ever imposed upon a nation. They had willingly left their fields to grow weeds, their children to run wild and perhaps to starve; they had cheerfully divided their last supplies of food with the Government, and had gone to the front steadily and hopefully. But now they could not fail to see that, in some points at least, there had been gross mismanagement. The food for which their families were pinched and almost starved, did not come to the armies. Vast stores of provision and supplies were blocked on the roads, while speculators' ventures passed over them. This, the soldiers in the trench and the laborer at the anvil saw equally.
They saw, too, that the Government was divided against itself; for the worse than weak Congress—which had formerly been as a nose of wax in Mr. Davis' fingers—had now turned dead against him. With the stolid obstinacy of stupidity it now refused to see any good in any measure, or in any man, approved by the Executive.
Under the leadership of Mr. Foote—who wasted the precious time of Congress in windy personal diatribes against Mr. Davis and his "pets"—nothing was done to combine and strengthen the rapidly sundering elements of Confederate strength. Long debates on General Pemberton; weighty disquisitions on such grave subjects as the number of pounds of pork on hand when Vicksburg was surrendered; and violent attacks on the whole past course of the administration, occupied the minds of those lawgivers. But at this time there was no single measure originated that proposed to stop the troubles in the future.
Therefore, the people lost confidence in the divided Government; and losing it began to distrust themselves. Suffering so for it, they could not fail to know the terrible strain to which the country had been subjected. They knew that her resources in men and material had been taxed to the limit; that there was no fresh supply of either upon which to draw. This was the forlorn view that greeted them when they looked within. And outside, fresh armies faced and threatened them on every side—increased rather than diminished, and better armed and provided than ever before.
This state of things was too patent not to be seen by the plainest men; and seeing it, those became dispirited who never had doubted before. And this time, the gloom did not lift; it became a settled and dogged conviction that we were fighting the good fight almost against hope. Not that this prevented the army and the people from working still, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; but they worked without the cheery hopefulness of the past.
Fate seemed against them. Had they been Turks they would have said: "It is kismet! Allah is great!" As they were only staunch patriots, they reasoned: "It is fearful odds—but we may win." And so solemnly, gloomily—but none the less determined—the South again prepared for the scarcely doubtful strife.