generals, he can hardly be blamed for a disposition to interfere with them at the beginning.  But military historians, while criticising (perhaps a little hastily) all Lincoln’s interventions in the affairs of war up to the time when he found generals whom he trusted, insist that Davis’ systematic interference was far more harmful to his cause; and Wolseley, who watched events closely from Canada and who visited the Southern Army in 1863, is most emphatic in this opinion.  He interfered with Lee to an extent which nothing but Lee’s devoted friendship and loyalty could have made tolerable.  He put himself into relations of dire hostility with Joseph Johnston, and in 1864 suspended him in the most injudicious manner.  Above all, when the military position of the South had begun to be acutely perilous, Jefferson Davis neither devised for himself, nor allowed his generals to devise, any bold policy by which the chance that still remained could be utilised.  His energy of will showed itself in the end in nothing but a resolution to protract bloodshed after it had certainly become idle.

If we turn to the political conditions, on which, in any but a short war, so much depends, the South will appear to have had great advantages.  Its people were more richly endowed than the mixed and crudely democratic multitude of the North, in the traditional aptitude for commanding or obeying which enables people to pull together in a crisis.  And they were united in a cause such as would secure the sustained loyalty of any ordinary people under any ordinary leader.  For, though it was nothing but slavery that led to their assertion of independence, from the moment that they found themselves involved in war, they were fighting for a freedom to which they felt themselves entitled, and for nothing else whatever.  A few successful encounters at the start tempted the ordinary Southerner to think himself a better man than the ordinary Northerner, even as the Southern Congressmen felt themselves superior to the persons whom the mistaken democracy of the North too frequently elected.  This claim of independence soon acquired something of the fierce pride that might have been felt by an ancient nation.  But it would have been impossible that the Northern people as a whole should be similarly possessed by the cause in which they fought.  They did not seem to be fighting for their own liberty, and they would have hated to think that they were fighting for conquest.  They were fighting for the maintenance of a national unity which they held dear.  The question how far it was worth fighting a formidable enemy for the sake of eventual unity with him, was bound to present itself.  Thus, far from wondering that the cause of the Union aroused no fuller devotion than it did in the whole lump of the Northern people, we may wonder that it inspired with so lofty a patriotism men and women in every rank of life who were able to leaven that lump.  But the political element in this war was of such importance as to lead to a startling result; the North came nearest to yielding at a time when in a military sense its success had become sure.  To preserve a united North was the greatest and one of the hardest of the duties of President Lincoln.