THE LAST AGONY OF THE CONFEDERACY.* IT has been said

with much truth that the continuance of the great Secession struggle for four years was either a paradox or a miracle. Yet, even after Sherman's giant stride across the South in the winter of 1864.65 had proved the whole Confederacy to be a mere shell, there were few who anticipated the sudden and utter collapse of April. The dauntless front which Lee presented against overwhelming odds imposed upon friend and foe alike; and the volumes before us, a

mere fragment of the war literature of the South which is accumulating so rapidly, prove conclusively that up to the

very last there was no failure of heart and hope in his indomitable ranks :—

" We relied not so much," writes Major Stiles, " on any special plans or hopes, but rather upon the inherently imperishable cause, the inherently unconquerable man. Fresh disaster each day did not affect our confidence. We were quite ready to admit, indeed we had already contemplated anything and everything this side of the ultimate disaster, but that: never !"

Brigadier Duke, of Morgan's Cavalry, who was almost the last man in the South to lay down his arms, pictures the indescribable dismay with which the veterans of Early's coin. mend learned of Lee's surrender :—

" If the light of heaven had gone out a more utter despair and consternation would not have ensued. When the news first came it perfectly paralysed every one. Men looked at each other as if they had just heard a sentence of death and eternal ruin passed upon all."

Another of these writers, Senator Reagan, the Postmaster- General, upon whom it devolved that sad April Sunday to break to Jefferson Davis the intelligence that Lee was in retreat, gives a striking description of the stupor into which the Southern capital was plunged "when that ill news was told" :—

" The booming of the guns of the'enemy told of the approaching host, and preparations were hurriedly made for the departure of the governmental forces. The pen of man cannot be dipped in ink dark enough to draw the darkness of that night which fell over Richmond. Throughout the city reigned a quiet, undemonstrative • (1) Four Years tinder Morse Robert. By Robert Stiles, Major of Artillery in the Aril of Northern Virginia. W.] —(2) Morgan's Cavalry. By Basil W. Duke. $2.J--(3) Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer. By tieneral G. Moxley rrel. [102.1—(4) Memoirs, with Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War. By tolm H. Reagan, LL.D., Postmaster-General of the Confederacy, sometime United States Senator. M.] New York : The Neale Publishing Company.

confusion, such as the realisation of the inevitable draws with it—hardly a soul in all the capital found rest in sleep, for on the morrow it was certain that the dream of an independent Con- federacy would have blown over like a mist from the sea. Never before had Richmond felt that the doom of capture was in store for her. During four long years the armies of the enemy had been beaten away from her very gates, but now the sad realisation of the inevitable seemed to possess the gallant Confederate citizens. During the years of conflict they had become inured to the rattle of their windows by the thunder of the Federal guns, but now all was suddenly changed."

Yet even on that last desperate retreat which ended at Appomattox Courthouse the courage of officers and men flamed high as ever. " All over, Sir ? " replied Major Stiles, with the greatest sincerity, as he tells us, to the mournful ejaculation of a civilian friend too old to march in the ranks— "Over, Sir ? Why, Sir, it has just begun. We are now where a good many of us have for a good while longed to be. Richmond gone, nothing to take care of, foot loose, and thank God out of these miserable lines. Now we may be able to get what we have longed for for months, a fair fight in an open field. Let them come on, if they are ready for this, and the sooner the better."

The gallant Major, who had served his guns in the thick of the fight from the opening days of the war, was spared the closing scene at Appomattox by being taken prisoner a day or two earlier at Sailors' Creek at the end of a murderous day. The finale of this, the last battle of the army of Northern Virginia, in which Lee's rearguard under Ewell was isolated by overwhelming numbers, degenerated into a mere butchery and a confused melee of brutal personal conflicts. "I saw numbers of men," says Major Stiles, "kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets, and even bite each other's throats and ears and noses, rolling on the ground like wild beasts"

"I had cautioned my men against wearing Yankee overcoats' especially in battle, but had not been able to enforce the order perfectly—and almost at my side I saw a young fellow of one of my companies jamb the muzzle of his musket against the back of the head of his most intimate friend clad in a Yankee overcoat and blow his brains out. I was wedged in between fighting men, only my right arm free. I tried to strike the musket barrel up, but alas, my sword had broken in the clash and I could not reach it. I well remember the yell of demoniac triumph with which that simple country lad of yesterday clubbed his musket and whirled savagely upon another victim. '

Yet these men were to a large extent soft garrison troops, uninured to labour and hardship and privation and peril, tried almost beyond human endurance by the audacious pressure of the enemy's cavalry, and by the lack of sleep and rest and food. From midnight on Sunday, when the retreat began, to sunset on Thursday, when the rearguard laid down its arms, Major Stiles is able to recall only one issue of rations. Nor were the main body and the headquarters in better plight. During the pourparlers before the surrender the Federal officer who came in with the flag of truce offered Captain Perry, of Sorrel's brigade, a drink of some very fine old brandy -out of his silver flask. Worn-down, hungry, and dispirited, the Captain "owned up" in after years that he "wanted that drink awfully " :— " But," he says, "I raised myself about an inch higher, if possible, bowed and refused politely, trying to produce the ridiculous appearance of having feasted on champagne and pound cake not ten minutes before, and that I had not the slightest use for so plebeian a drink as fine brandy. He was a true gentleman, begged pardon, and placed the flask in his pocket again, without touching the contents in my presence. If he had taken a drink and my Confederal, olfactories had obtained a whiff of the odour of it, it is possible that I should have caved.' The truth is, I had not eaten two ounces in two days, and I had my coat- tail then full of corn, waiting to parch it as soon as opportunity might present itself. I did not leave it behind me because I had nobody I could trust it with."

When Captain Perry bade farewell to the Commander-in- Chief there were tears in the eyes of both of them. "Helves in all respects the greatest man that ever lived, and, as an humble officer of the South, I thank Heaven that I had the honour of following him." Indeed, with every record that leaps to light the greater and the purer glow the name and fame of Robert Lee, " Marse Robert," as the soldiers of Virginia named their leader in fond reminiscence of the old plantation speech :—

"He was of all men," to quote Major Stiles, "most attractive to us, yet by no means most approachable. We loved him much but we revered him more. We never criticised, never doubted him, never attributed to him either moral error or mental weak nem no not even in our secret hearts or most audacious thoughts. I really believe it would have strained and blurred our strongest and clearest conceptions of the distinction between right, and wrong to have entertained even for a moment thethought that he had ever acted from any other than the purest' and loftiest motive. I never but once heard of such a suggestion, and thenit so transported the hearers that military subordination was fop-. gotten, and the Colonel who heard it rushed with drawn sword against the Major-General who made it."

There was more than mere humour, he adds, in the proviso. with which a ragged rebel accepted the doctrine of evoln- tion,—" The rest of us may have descended or ascended from monkeys, but it took a God to.make Marse Robert" ; and he recalls a conversation that he once overheard beside a camp-

fire " between two Calvinists in Confederate rags and tatters, shreds and patches, in which one simply and sincerely inquired of his fellow who had just spoken of ' Old Master' whether he referred to 'the one up at headquarters or the One up yonder.' "

Four Years under Marse Robert is a book of exceptional interest and no mean literary charm. It deserves, together with the other works that we have bracketed with it, to be read and pondered over by those who wish to understand the mechanism and capabilities of a national Army, as well as the

spirit which animated the solid South while its life-blood was being slowly drained away. It is no disparagement to the Stars and Stripes if we do honour to those who served and died under the Stars and Bars. When all is done that man could do and all is done in vain, the human heart goes out to the weaker side,—to the soldiers who fought on ragged and starving to the bitter inevitable end, to the leaders who would never admit that hope was lost, and to the noble women of the South who gave of their bravest and their best without a murmur. Across the Atlantic the hatchet has long since been buried, and the North no longer takes it amiss if, with leave and license from the poet of "Barbara Freitchie," we bow the bead over the grave of Stonewall Jackson and the flower of the Southern chivalry. In thus honouring the memory of those whom their foes called, and rightly called, rebels we shall the better understand why it was that the sympathies of so many generous spirits, both on the Continent of Europe and in the United States of America, were with our recent opponents and present fellow-subjects in South Africa.