href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@34334@34334-h@34334-h-1.htm.html#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[2] From this total General Adams deducts twenty per cent, for exempts of all classes. "There were then remaining a minimum of 1,160,000 effectives, to which we must add men from the Border States 117,000; giving a total Confederate strength of 1,277,000." He says also: "The whole male arms-bearing population was thus put in arms."

Now I wish on the very threshold to acknowledge freely that this conclusion is not, in the opinion of General Adams, discreditable to the South, but the reverse. He holds that the Southern estimate of a total strength of only 600,000 with the Confederate colors, is discreditable to the spirit and the patriotism of our people. In his opinion a just appreciation of the virtue and self-sacrifice exhibited by the men of the South should lead us to accept the much higher estimate which he gives, not reluctantly, but freely and cheerfully. He thinks that we who contest it place the Southern people on a lower level of devotion than the Boers of South Africa.

THE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BOERS AND THE CONFEDERATES

He says, at p. 239 of his "Military Studies": "How was it under very similar circumstances with the South Africans? On Confederate showing, they are a braver, a more patriotic, and self-sacrificing race!" He goes on to show that the Boers had in actual service more than 1 in 4 of their population; while, if it be true that there were only 600,000 Southern soldiers in the Confederacy, there was only 1 out of 12 at the front. This, he thinks, would be discreditable to Confederate manhood; he cannot believe that the Southerners of that period were a race of such "mean-spirited, stay-at-home skulkers."

In answer to this I shall undertake to show in the following pages that Mr. Adams' figures are very wide of the mark, so that the proportion of fighting men in the Confederate army was enormously greater than he admits in this passage, not less than 1 in 6 of the population. But the fact is that the conditions in the cases of the Boers and the Confederates were about as dissimilar as they well could be. In the one case there was a small, compact population, for the most part half civilized, and occupying a territory less than a quarter of that included in the Confederacy. They had no highly differentiated civilization to support. In the Confederacy there were eleven States, each of which was organized as a distinct government and each of which required a large number of men to fill its offices and to maintain its civilization. Large numbers of men were also needed, as I shall show, for purposes of manufacture, and to supply the army with food and munitions of war. To compare a small community of 323,000 (Boers) with a nation of 5,000,000 whites, besides 3,000,000 blacks; a perfectly homogeneous people with one containing divers elements; a semi-civilized people with one whose civilization was highly differentiated; a people accustomed to live on the veldt in the saddle, with one dwelling largely in towns and cities and engaged in diversified occupations—is to make a comparison illusory in a high degree.

In confirmation of the preceding statement, I add the following passage from a letter addressed to me by my friend, Colonel Archer Anderson, of Richmond, Va.:

"My argument was that the comparison of the Confederates with the Boers was not fair, the Boers being at a primitive stage of civilization—a pastoral and agricultural people with no arts, no culture, and no wants beyond a bare subsistence. Such a people can call out a large proportion of its population, and in their case there was the particular advantage that through their relations to the great mining region operated by foreigners, they had accumulated a vast treasure and a great stock of European munitions of war, and for a long period were able to draw what they further needed from Europe through their railway communication with the Portuguese port on Delagoa Bay. You have shown that the Confederates on the other hand were highly civilized, with national, State, and municipal institutions to maintain, and, being cut off from supplies from the outside world, obliged to extemporize varied manufactures of powder, cannon, small arms, clothing, shoes, hats, and every sort of material needed by their railway systems and their people at home as well as the armies in the field. The maintenance of civil government, and such a task of production over and above the yield of agriculture, required the abstraction of a vast number of men from military service."

It is instructive, in considering this argument to recall what a great historian tells us of the Helvetii, in their contest with Cæsar. He says,

"The whole population of the assembled tribes amounted to 368,000 souls, including women and children: the number that bore arms was 92,000." (Merivale, History of the Romans, vol. I, pp. 242-3.)

Here is a real historical parallel between two peoples at a not dissimilar stage of civilization. Their numbers were very nearly the same: in one case 323,000, in the other 368,000; and their fighting strength was about in the same proportion,—one in four of the population; 89,000 in one case, 92,000 in the other.

It may be added that if Mr. Adams is right in estimating the Southern armies at nearly 1,300,000 men, then we face the remarkable fact that a white population of a little more than 5,000,000 people sent to the front almost as many men as a population of over 22,000,000. For Colonel Livermore tells us there were 2,234,000 individuals in the United States army; but of these, 186,017 were negroes, 494,000 foreigners, and 86,000 from the Southern states; so that the North only sent into the field 1,467,083.

Judged then by the numerical standard, the patriotism and devotion of the Southern people, according to this showing, was to that of the North as four to one. And this takes no account of the many thousands who served the South as mechanics, laborers, etc.

FUNDAMENTAL ERROR IN THE ARGUMENT OF NORTHERN WRITERS

It seems to be overlooked by General Adams, Colonel Livermore, and other persons, in their estimates of the population available for military purposes, that the Confederate States' Government had not only to organize an army, but also to establish extensive manufacturing plants for the equipment of the army; for clothing, for harness, for saddles, for guns, powder, and ordnance; even for mining the ore which had to be worked up into iron for the Tredegar works and other similar plants within the limits of the Confederacy.

Again, a large contingent of men had to be retained as railway servants and government clerks, and for purposes of agriculture, for it must be remembered that not one in ten of the soldiers in the Confederate army was an owner of slaves, and therefore a very large proportion of the agriculture of the country had to be carried on by white men. It is also overlooked that the complicated machinery of civilized government had to be maintained in eleven States with the necessary officers and clerks pertaining to their administration. (This is one of the particulars in which the case of the Boer Republic differs so radically from that of the Southern Confederacy that the comparison between the two is quite illusory.) If, as General Adams insists, "the whole male arms-bearing was thus put in arms," one cannot but wonder who did all these things just enumerated?

When these things are taken into consideration, and the figures I shall present are care