THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR
In recounting the history of Lincoln’s Presidency,
it will be necessary to mark the course of the Civil
War stage by stage as we proceed. There are,
however, one or two general features of the contest
with which it may be well to deal by way of preface.
It has seldom happened that a people entering upon
a great war have understood at the outset what the
character of that war would be. When the American
Civil War broke out the North expected an easy victory,
but, as disappointment came soon and was long maintained,
many clever people adopted the opinion, which early
prevailed in Europe, that there was no possibility
of their success at all. At the first the difficulty
of the task was unrecognised; under early and long-sustained
disappointment the strength by which those difficulties
could be overcome began to be despaired of without
reason.
The North, after several slave States, which were
at first doubtful, had adhered to it, had more than
double the population of the South; of the Southern
population a very large part were slaves, who, though
industrially useful, could not be enlisted. In
material resources the superiority of the North was
no less marked, and its material wealth grew during
the war to a greater extent than had perhaps ever happened
to any other belligerent power. These advantages
were likely to be decisive in the end, if the North
could and would endure to the end. But at the
very beginning these advantages simply did not tell
at all, for the immediately available military force
of the North was insignificant, and that of the South
clearly superior to it; and even when they began to
tell, it was bound to be very long before their full
weight could be brought to bear. And the object
which was to be obtained was supremely difficult of
attainment. It was not a defeat of the South
which might result in the alteration of a frontier,
the cession of some Colonies, the payment of an indemnity,
and such like matters; it was a conquest of the South
so complete that the Union could be restored on a
firmer basis than before. Any less result than
this would be failure in the war. And the country,
to be thus completely conquered by an unmilitary people
of nineteen millions, was of enormous extent:
leaving out of account the huge outlying State of
Texas, which is larger than Germany, the remaining
Southern States which joined in the Confederacy have
an area somewhat larger than that of Germany, Austria-Hungary,
Holland, and Belgium put together; and this great
region had no industrial centres or other points of
such great strategic importance that by the occupation
of them the remaining area could be dominated.
The feat which the Northern people eventually achieved
has been said by the English historians of the war
(perhaps with some exaggeration) to have been “a
greater one than that which Napoleon attempted to
his own undoing when he invaded Russia in 1812.”
