George Eggleston - The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

Thus the old staple industry has doubled and trebled its productiveness under the influence of the new industrial conditions created by the war and by the social and economic revolution which the war wrought.

But this is a small part of the matter. Greatly as the yield of cotton has been multiplied under the new conditions, cotton has ceased to be king even in the land over which it once exercised undisputed sway. Other and humbler agricultural products – never thought of in the old planting days as money crops – have come, in their value to rival cotton itself as a source of enrichment to Southern agriculture.

More important still, the new conditions that were created in the South as a result of the war have led to the development there of resources of inestimable value which were wholly neglected under the old system. The little, local, loitering railroad lines of the older time have been combined and extended and upbuilt into great arteries of travel and traffic. Prairies that were scratched over for the sake of meager cotton crops of half a bale to the acre have been delved under for coal and iron. Industrial cities of importance have arisen where cabins remotely stood. Blast furnaces have replaced the breezes that once alone disturbed the broom-straw grass. Iron foundries, steel mills, machine shops, coke ovens, rolling mills and the like employ men by tens of thousands where before only a few hundreds compelled the reluctant soil to yield them a precarious living. The still unsubdued pine lands are dotted all over with cotton mills which give work and wages to a multitude and the magnitude of their dividends strongly tempts capital to a like investment elsewhere in the country that was once abundantly content to produce a raw material and to buy back the finished products of it from factories hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The harbors of the South, once mere ports of call or refuge for a shipping that belonged elsewhere, have become the seats of great shipbuilding and ship-owning enterprises the productiveness of which is loosely reckoned by imperfectly counted millions.

Still again, under the new conditions resulting from the war, great industries have sprung up in the South which find both their profit and their reason for being in the utilization of things that were sheer waste under the old system. The manufacture of cotton seed oil and its rich by-products is the best illustrative example of this. It employs thousands of well paid workmen and millions of well remunerated capital in converting into very valuable products the cotton seed that was once utilized only as a fertilizer for half-exhausted soils.

In brief, the political and social revolution wrought by the war is matched and over-matched by the stupendous economic revolution produced, a revolution whose rewards to industry, to capital and to enterprise are such as the wildest visionary would have laughed at as a futile dream when the South lay stripped and stricken and staggering under its burden of perplexities at the end of a struggle which had taxed its material resources to the point of exhaustion and which had well-nigh exterminated its vigorous young manhood.

It is to tell the story of a war thus stupendous in its causes, its events and its consequences that this book is written. There is nowhere in history a story more dramatic, more heroic or more intimately inspired by those emotions that control human conduct and work out the events of human life. The endeavor in these volumes will be to relate that story with absolute loyalty to truth.

The writer of these pages is persuaded that the time has fully come when this may be acceptably done; that the time has passed away when any American of well ordered mind desires the perversion or the suppression of truth with respect to our war history. There is certainly nothing in that history of which any part of the American people need be ashamed.

The great actors in the drama have all passed away. The passions of the war are completely gone. Even in politics, war prejudices no longer play a part worth considering. The time seems fully come when one may write truth with regard to the war with the certainty of a waiting welcome for his words. The time has come which General Grant foresaw in 1865, when he predicted that the superb strategy and unconquerable endurance of Lee and the brilliant military play of Sherman, the splendid prowess of Stonewall Jackson and the picturesque achievements of Phil Sheridan, the extraordinary dash and enterprise of J. E. B. Stuart on the one side and of Custer on the other, would all be reckoned a common possession in the storehouse of American memory, a subject of pride and satisfaction wherever there might be an American to glory in the deeds of his countrymen.

The time has come when the prowess of the American soldier, equally on the one side and upon the other, his measureless courage, his exhaustless endurance, his all-defiant devotion to duty, his extraordinary steadiness under a fire such as few soldiers on earth have ever been called upon to face, his patience under long marchings, starvation and every circumstance of suffering, are subjects of justly indiscriminate admiration on both sides of a geographical line long since obliterated.

The story of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg may now be told to Northern ears as surely sympathetic with the heroism shown in that world-famous action as are any ears at the South. The heroic tale of the Federal assaults upon Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg where brave men, knowing the futility of their endeavors, obeyed orders and went to their deaths by thousands because it was their duty to do so may now be told to listening Southern ears with as absolute certainty of applause as if the story were related only to veterans of the Army of the Potomac.

"East is East, and West is West" writes Kipling in one of his finest ballads in celebration of generous personal courage. Paraphrasing, we may say: "North is North and South is South," but courage, heroism, devotion and a generous chivalry belong to no time and no country exclusively. They are the common possessions of all worthy manhood. Like the gold beneath the guinea's stamp they pass current wherever coined because their value is inherent.

The war of 1861–65 was in fact a revolution. Had the South succeeded in the purposes with which that war was undertaken it would have divided the American Republic into two separate and independent confederations of states, the Union and the Southern Confederacy. The North having succeeded, no such division was accomplished, but none the less was a revolution wrought as has been suggested in the introductory chapter of this work.

Familiarly, and by way of convenience, we are accustomed to call this "The Civil war," in contra-distinction from those other wars in which the American power has been arrayed against that of foreign nations. But the term "Civil war," as thus applied, is neither accurate nor justly descriptive. In all that is essential to definition this was a public and not a civil war and it is necessary to a just understanding of the struggle and its outcome to bear this fact in mind. Otherwise the entire attitude and conduct of the Federal government toward its antagonist must be inexplicable, inconsistent and wanting in dignity.

The Southern States asserted and undertook to maintain by a resolute appeal to arms, their right to an independent place among the nations of the earth. In the end they failed in that endeavor. But while the conflict lasted they so far maintained their contention as to win from their adversary a sufficient recognition of their attitude to serve all the purposes of public rather than civil war.

They instituted and maintained a government, with a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, a department of state, an army, a navy, a treasury, and all the rest of the things that independent nations set up as the official equipment of their national housekeeping.