§ 694]

COST AND GAIN

579

whereby the more progressive portion of the country had to force its advanced political thought and its better labor system upon the weaker, stationary portion. It prevented the break-up of the country into squabbling communities, to be engaged in incessant bickerings over trade and boundaries, and it preserved the vast breadth of the continent for peace. It demonstrated to

skeptical European aristocracies that the great Republic was not "a bubble," but "the most solid fact in history."

694. One part of the cost is yet to be counted. April 14, 1865, while the North was still blazing with illuminations over the surrender of Lee's army, it was plunged into gloom by the assassination of Lincoln. The great President was murdered by a crazed actor, a sympathizer of the South. No man was left to stand between North and South as mediator, and to bind up the wounds of the Nation with great-hearted pity and all-suffic

ing influence, as Lincoln could have done. His death was an incomparable loss to the South. It added fierce flame to the spirit of vengeance at the North, and it explains in part the blunders and sins of the Republican party in the "Reconstruction" that followed the war.

FOR FURTHER READING. -The best military story in brief form is Dodge's Bird's-eye View of the Civil War. Details are given in an interesting series of articles, "Campaigns of the Civil War," written by generals of both sides, in the Century, VII-XIII.

Other phases of the war, with considerable attention to campaigns, are treated briefly and clearly in Paxson's Civil War ("Home University" series). This is the best one volume for a student to read. The great history of the period is Rhodes' seven volumes, The History of the United States after 1850. That work should be accessible in the larger schools for reference. Ida Tarbell's Lincoln, Morse's Lincoln, Hart's Chase, Lee's General Lee, and Davis' Jefferson Davis are among the best biographies for high school use.

Illustrative material is abundant, such as Eggleston's Rebel's Recollections; Page's Among the Camps and Burial of the Guns; Frederic's Copperhead; Louisa Alcott's Hospital Sketches; and Avary's Virginia Girl in the Civil War.

CHAPTER LIX

RECONSTRUCTION

695. PEACE brought new problems. The North paid off its million men under arms, and sent them to their homes at the rate of one or two hundred thousand a month. At the close of 1865, only some fifty thousand remained, to garrison the South. The disbanded "old soldiers" found place in the industry of the country without disturbing the usual order. In part this remarkable fact was due to "free land." Many thousands who saw no opening in their old homes became "homesteaders" in the West. The government, too, sharply reduced internal taxes. At the same time, after 1869, it cut down the huge national debt resolutely so that by 1890 half of it had been paid, including the paper money.

696. For the wrecked South, the problems were infinitely more difficult. Its "old soldiers" toiled homeward painfully, mostly on foot, from Northern prison camps and from surrendered armies. In some districts, remote from the march of the Union armies, there was still abundance of food, with the Negroes at work in the fields; but over wide areas the returned soldier found his home in ashes, his stock carried off, his family scattered, the labor system utterly gone. Many an aristocrat, who in April had ruled a veteran regiment, in July was hunting desperately for a mule,' that he might plow an acre or two, to raise food wherewith to keep his delicately nurtured family from starvation. The destruction of bridges and tearing up of

1 At Lee's surrender, General Grant, with characteristic good sense and generosity, had told the men to keep their horses, which, said he, they would need for the spring work. This practice, followed by other Union commanders, lightened in some slight degree the suffering of the South.