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sons of well-known character, experienced in their management, and whose management and care should conform as nearly as might be to that of a prudent owner of slaves upon his own plantation. Without this, and unless much attention was given to the proper care and treatment of the slaves, great dissatisfaction would necessarily ensue amongst the owners, who, as a class, are always supposed to take great interest in everything pertaining to the comfort and welfare of their servants.

The slaves, for the purposes mentioned, should, of course, be drawn according to some fixed rule from the entire body of slave owners in the State, and not taken from some small neighborhood or county locality. As the war in which we are now engaged was brought about, in a measure, for the protection of rights connected with slave property, I take for granted that those who own slaves are not only quite willing to render every personal service which the country may require, but will gladly show to those who own no slaves, and who so patriotically swell the ranks of our armies, the greatest willingness to relieve them in every possible way from hardships incident to the service in which they are engaged by the substitution of slave labor when it can be done. This will be but their reasonable duty.

These last remarks, though not called for by your special inquiries, are nevertheless given as reflections not entirely irrelevant. In truth, sir, did it not seem to excuse to some extent the avowed purpose of the Federal Government to use the negro against us, if in their power, a small percentage of our male slaves should be made to act with their masters in the field against the common enemy of both. I am quite sure that such an exhibition of confidence on our part would have a salutary effect in preventing the alienation and demoralization of that class of our people.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
DANIEL RUGGLES,
Brigadier-General, P. A. C. S.

(Signed)

Within a brief period the legislature of the State of Mississippi authorized Governor Pettus to hold ten thousand slaves subject to the requisition of the President of the Confederate States, to be employed upon the military defenses of the State of Mississippi. During this period I was commanding the Department of Mississippi, as the successor of Major-General Earl Van Dorn, who had marched with an army, then recently organized, to attack the Federal enemy at Corinth.

In the meantime, and in anticipation of summary action of the legislature of Mississippi, I had occasion to send dispatches to Richmond by a distinguished volunteer aide-de-camp, to whom I confided my views in relation to the employment of slaves for manual labor in connection with our military defenses, and with the view of the gradual enrollment of selected slaves for bearing arms for service with armies in the field. It was contemplated that exemplary conduct by the slave, and faithful service in the field, would entitle him to a well-defined and liberal personal reward.

On his return, my aide-de-camp informed me that no member of the Confederate cabinet appeared to give the subject favorable consideration.

Thus our earliest effort systematically to utilize and enroll negro slaves in the Confederate armies for service in the field proved abortive. FREDERICKSBURG, Va.

Daniel Ruggles.

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Alexander's and Garnett's battalions of artillery are not included in this return. Alexander's battalion had twenty-six guns, Garnett's fifteen. Estimating them at the same number of men per gun as in the battalions reporting gives 935 to add to the total, making the lineof-battle strength of the army, 31st May, 75,413, with 247 pieces of artillery.

Early in June the army was reënforced by the infantry brigade of General J. J. Pettigrew from the Department of Richmond, with 3685 officers and men for duty, and the brigade of General Joseph R. Davis, from the Department of North Carolina, with 2577 for duty. The strength of these brigades is taken from the return of the Department of Richmond and of North Carolina for May 31, 1863. Corse's brigade of Pickett's division and one of Pettigrew's regiments, about 2200 in all, were left at Hanover Junction. Three of General Early's regiments, numbering, according to an article by that officer in Vol. V. of the Southern Historical Society papers, 919 for duty, were detached at Winchester to guard prisoners and garrison that place. The 25th Virginia of Johnson's division, and the 31st Virginia of Early's division, which had been on detached service since April 20, rejoined their commands near Winchester with 700 men for duty, and at the same place the 2d Maryland battalion was added to Johnson's division. Major Goldsborough, in his history of the "Maryland Line," says it took 500 men into action at Gettysburg. The Confederate infantry that crossed the Potomac, assuming that the gain by recruits, conscripts, and return of convalescent, furloughed, and detached men was offset by the small loss at Winchester and by sickness and desertion, was 64,000.

The cavalry was reënforced at Winchester by the Ist Maryland battalion, 300 strong, and by the brigade of General A. G. Jenkins, 1800 for duty. General Imboden, with a force which, in an article in "The Galaxy" for April, 1871, he states as "about 2100 effective mounted men and a six-gun battery," joined the army at Chambersburg. The commands of Mosby and Gilmore were also attached to the cavalry.

Two batteries of six guns each were added to the artillery: one, the Baltimore Light Artillery, at Winchester; one came with Imboden.

The Confederate army in the Gettysburg campaign had for duty in round numbers at least

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and on the field of Gettysburg eighty thousand men.

The loss of the army is incompletely given in the report of its Medical Director, printed in the Appendix

to the Comte de Paris's history of the battle as 20,448. In Pettigrew's brigade, and probably in other brigades of Hill's corps, the losses for the first day only are given. The reports of the corps commanders, which can be found in Vols. II. and X. of the Southern Historical Society papers, give the casualties as follows: Wounded. Missing.

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Killed -933 .930

Total.

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849

4,289

3,844

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The loss of the cavalry is nowhere accurately given.

74,478 From Beverly Ford to Upperville inclusive it was 995.

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"Stonewall Jackson's Intentions at Harper's Ferry."

IN an article which appeared in your magazine in June, 1886, written by General John G. Walker, late of the Confederate army, entitled "Harper's Ferry and Sharpsburg," the statement is made by the author that he received a signal order from General Stonewall Jackson not to open fire on Harper's Ferry unless forced to do so, as he (Jackson) designed to summon the Federal commander to surrender, and, should he refuse, to give him time to remove non-combatants and then carry the place by assault. This statement, I am told, has been questioned by General Bradley T. Johnson and Colonel H. Kyd Douglas, and the object of this note is to confirm General Walker's statement. I was at the time assistant adjutant-general of the division commanded by General Walker, and was present on Loudoun Heights when the order in question was received; and I recollect that in consequence of its receipt the fire of our guns, which had

been in position from an early hour in the morning, was withheld until the afternoon, and was not then opened until the Federal batteries on Bolivar Heights opened on the infantry force of General Walker, under the command of Colonel (now Senator) Ransom.

My three years' daily intercourse with General Jackson at the Virginia Military Institute makes me confident that, in giving his signal orders, he would neither consult with his subordinates near him nor inform them what orders he had given or would give under the circumstances; therefore it is not surprising that the orders sent to General Walker were not known. The knowledge of the contradiction of General Walker's statement has just reached me. Hence the tardiness of my confirmation of its substantial accuracy.

William A. Smith.

"A Question of Command at Franklin." WE have received from General D. S. Stanley a letter in reply to General Cox's statement in THE CENTURY for February, 1889 (page 630). In this letter General Stanley denies that he retired from the field of Franklin after he had been wounded, or that General Cox was the senior officer of the line from the time Wagner's troops were driven back until the battle was entirely ended. General Cox, however, does not recede from his position on these points. The details of the controversy cannot be given here.- EDITOR.

SOME

John Bright.

TOPICS OF THE TIME.

OME of us still have vivid recollections of that agony of blood and sweat through which the great North American Republic vindicated its right and title to nationality. It had fixed its boundaries and defended them successfully against assaults from abroad; now it was to prove to the world that those boundaries were not to be broken down by any force from within. Though a new generation has come into being since then, twenty-five years are too few to make us forget how the scales, which had been so long in dubious balance, began to settle slowly towards the side of the maintenance of the Union; nor can they make us forget how the waiting-time was broken again and again by the ring of good cheer in the words of the dead leader whose thoroughly English name heads this article.

The American people will not remember John Bright best as the opponent of the Corn Laws, as the uncompromising free trader, as the friend of oppressed nationalities everywhere, or as the man who dared denounce the Crimean war, though it cost him his seat in the House of Commons; they will remember him better as men remember him who stands their friend when most they need a friend. There was a time when, in Bright's own words at Birmingham, "nearly 500,000 persons - men, women, and children — at this

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1 For the comments by General Johnson and Colonel Douglas see The Century War Book, "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," Vol. II., p. 615 et seq.

moment are saved from the utmost extremes of famine, not a few of them from death, by the contributions which they are receiving from all parts of the country." There was but one barrier - the blockade-between this hungry people and the prosperity which abundant cotton would bring them; and there were voices in plenty to urge them to bid their Government attempt to break the blockade. No one can say that it was John Bright's eloquence which held Lancashire to the conviction that its permanent interest was in the success of the American experiment; but it is certain that John Bright's eloquence lost nothing in effectiveness from the fact that he had given up his income, and allowed his six cotton-mills to stand idle rather than say one word which would even embarrass the American people in the throes of their struggle for national existence.

John Bright was as absolutely destitute of fear as John Knox. He was not to be moved by any social pressure from telling workingmen the truth, as he understood it, about the hopes which filled many English high places for the downfall of the American Republic. "Privilege," said he to them in 1863, "thinks it has a great interest in it, and every morning, with blatant voice, it comes into your streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty million men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king, without the surroundings of a court, without great armies and great navies, without great debt, and without great taxes. And Privilege has shud

dered at what might happen to old Europe if this grand experiment should succeed." All his arguments to English workingmen might be summed up in one of his pregnant sentences: "My countrymen who work for your living-remember this: there will be one wild shriek of freedom to startle all mankind if that American Republic should be overthrown."

It is not as the mere friend of America that Americans should remember John Bright; he was the advocate of his own country, and of all mankind, when he supported the principle for which the war for the Union was waged. If the "federation of the world," which was to put an end to wars and hereditary warriors and privileged classes everywhere, was not yet possible, it was to the interest of peace that one nationality should control central North America and banish war from its jurisdiction. And so John Bright, the man of peace, was the vigorous champion of the most devastating war of his time. His work was even bolder than this, more consistent beneath an apparent inconsistency: it was from the sternest sense of duty that he, the typical Englishman, brought his indictment against the English Government, the English blockaderunners, and a part at least of the English Liberal party. It was a greater crime in his eyes to condone attacks upon the republican idea than even to imagine the death of the king; and he did not stop to measure his words when he spoke of it. "We supply the ships; we supply the arms, the munitions of war; we give aid and comfort to this foulest of all crimes. Englishmen only do it. They are English Liberal newspapers only which support this stupendous iniquity. They are English statesmen only, who profess to be Liberal, who have said a word in favor of the authors of this now enacting revolution in America." And the English Liberals have come to see clearly that John Bright's denunciation of his Government and party was only a wise preference of his country's highest good to her temporary and short-sighted whim.

His own countrymen may well regret that in his later years he lagged so far behind his pupils; that the veneering of surface dignity, which he had so often stripped from others, was so quick to take fire from the criticisms of Irish members; and that, among the leaders in the last great revolution in English public opinion, the picture of John Bright should be turned to the wall. But, after all, his name is even more the property of the world than of England; and the world, and especially the American quarter of it, has had no reason to veil the face of him who loved and served God and man first, and his own country afterwards. It can only take the long list of great names that the English stock has given it, Alfred and Sir Simon of Montfort, More, Latimer, and Bunyan, Eliot, Hampden, Cromwell, and Blake, Pitt, Wellington, and Nelson, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Cobden, and add to it a name which shall not be least in the list, that of John Bright.

The New States.

ONE of the acts of the Fiftieth Congress, almost in its closing hours, was the passage of a comprehensive Enabling Act, granting permission, on certain nominal conditions, for the formation of the four new States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington. There can be no doubt whatever that the con

ditions will be punctually fulfilled, that the privileges and responsibilities of State-hood will be very gladly accepted, and that the "new constellation," which began its course with thirteen States, will number fortytwo during the first year of its second century under the Constitution.

It is easy enough to misunderstand the sense in which this increase of States is mentioned by Americans. The numerical increase is itself indicative of a far larger increase in other forms. When there were but thirteen States, they hugged the Atlantic coast so closely that every one of them might have been called a salt-water State. As the roll of States has grown longer, it has meant that the center of population was moving westward, that orderly government and all the forces of civilization were creeping along the Gulf of Mexico and the shore of the Great Lakes, across the Mississippi, and beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Golden Gate. Each successive admission of a new State has been a milestone in the march of the American people towards the dominion of the continent. Now the system of States, which once only fringed the Atlantic, extends with but a single break across the continent. The increase of the number of States is so evidently parallel with the country's growth from a population of three millions to one of sixty millions, from poverty to wealth, from insignificance to respect, that a foreigner may be pardoned for thinking that the ideas were meant to be equivalent. He is apt to say, like Mr. Arnold: What of it? Are numbers the summum bonum? Was not your country happier when it was poorer, and more respectable when it was less respected? Better wish for a reduction in the number of your States, if there is any hope that such a reduction will bring you back your Washingtons, Jays, and Marshalls.

The Arnold interpretation may be a natural one, but it is exceedingly discreditable to the intelligence either of those to whom it is addressed or of him who makes it. The first of the alternative conclusions is improbable: the American has not usually been found guilty in other matters of such stupidity as would be implied necessarily in a glorification of mere numbers or size. He does not rate the Chinese Empire above Switzerland for intelligence, or the Russian Empire above the British for freedom. He cannot mean that he has any overweening pride in the number forty-two, as intrinsically superior to the number thirteen. The first business of an acute critic should have been to seek out the American's real reason for satisfaction in the growth of his country; and, as regards the number of States, the real reason is not far to seek.

It is a cardinal article of belief among peoples of European stock that the dark ages are over in their case. And yet medievalism is still most powerful with most of them in the intense belief of the governing or influential classes that it is better for the mass of the people to be governed than to govern themselves. "Constitutionalism" is represented at most in the dealings of the hereditary element with the legislative body at the capital: the peasant's advanced liberty consists rather in his share in the choice of the legislative body than in the development of his local government. Is there no value in that privilege of local self-government for which men are willing in Russia to brave the terrors of the bastion and of Siberia? - for which in France they seem to be willing to

surrender the shadow, if not the substance, of the national republic? - for which, in every country, the awakening human mind longs as a higher privilege than any national system can give? This privilege has been extended by the American system of selfgoverning States, without a struggle, without the repression of a single revolutionary throe of humankind, with the very minimum of human unhappiness, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over all central North America. Surely no political result has ever furnished more conclusive evidence of the advisability of leaving a people to work out their own natural solution of their own political problems. It is this crowning success of the American system, in some respects the crowning success of the century, which is summed up and embodied in the growth from thirteen to fortytwo States. And Americans have a right to be proud of it.

There is, perhaps, a technical question whether the admission of the new States is so far accomplished by the mere Enabling Act that their representative stars may properly be placed on the flag for the approaching Fourth of July. It is not probable, however, that the question will ever assume any practical importance. The older States of the Union will not be apt to cavil on points of etiquette in the welcome with which they meet their new sisters, or to stickle on the exact location of the threshold. The field of forty-two stars may not be legal for Federal agencies until next year, but there is assuredly nothing illegal in the prior recognition by States and private persons of the practical relations of the new States to the remainder of the Union. Such a recognition would be at the worst but a brief and passing irregularity; and that is hardly to be placed in the scale opposite to the comity of States. The fortunate design of our national flag enables the older States to signalize at once the cordiality with which they add to the roll of their sisterhood the names of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington.

How to Preserve the Forests.

A PLAN for the conservation of the forests on the lands which belong to the nation has recently been presented by "Garden and Forest." Almost the only forests remaining on the public lands are those of the mountain region of the Pacific States, and these forests have a special interest and value because of their relation to the agricultural capacity of a vast extent of country lying along the streams which have their sources in these mountain woods. These regions adjacent to the streams, or near enough to be irrigated from them, are not fertile in their present arid condition, but they are capable of great productiveness. All the elements of fertility are in the soil in abundant proportions, except water. This can be supplied only by irrigation. It does not come to these thirsty lands naturally, by rainfall, but must be assisted by the ingenious devices of man on its way to thousands of fields which will thus be made to blossom as the rose, where nature, unhelped, leaves wide expanses desert and unproductive. This water, which is the magical element by which this wilderness is transformed into a fruitful and populous country, is stored in the everlasting hills, where the rivers have their springs, and the forests are its natural

custodians and distributers. The water supply is abundant, and while the forests stand guard around the sources of the rivers, their flow is as everlasting as the hills themselves.

A mountain forest has more functions than most people have considered. It covers the hills with a vast mat or net-work of living root-fibers, and holds in place the ever-accumulating mass of mold and decomposing vegetable matter, which absorbs and retains the water of the rainfall and the melting snows. Such a forest is a great sponge, which receives all the water that falls on the mountains, and allows it to escape gradually, so as to maintain the steady flow of the rivers which it feeds. A forest is thus a natural reservoir for the storage and distribution of the water which falls upon it; and it is far more efficient, as well as far more economical, than any system of artificial storage reservoirs that can be substituted for it. If the forest is removed, this mighty sponge is destroyed, and there is then nothing to perform its function of holding back the water, which will rush down in overwhelming floods and torrents.

The first thing to be noted is that the water will thus all run away at once, at a time when but little of it is wanted, and there will be little or none of it left for the season when it is most needed. The rivers which have been fed by the mountain springs will soon be dry a great part of the year.

The next thing to be observed is that when the forests are destroyed the hills themselves are not everlasting. When the great sponge-like mass or cap of living root-fibers, mold, and decaying vegetation which the forest held in place as a crown for the hills is destroyed, the mountains themselves begin to crumble and melt away. The soil which for thousands of years has been meshed and matted along the steep slopes and around the shoulders of the hills has now nothing to keep it in place, and it begins to slip and sink away. When it is heaviest with accumulated water whole hillsides are dislodged from their supporting framework of rocks, and descend with resistless force to the plain below, carrying ruin in their path, and leaving the once beautiful face of the mountain seamed and scarred. The rivers are choked, their channels silted up, and the valleys and adjacent plains are buried irrecoverably beneath the vast accumulations of sand, gravel, and débris which the resistless annual floods bring down from the dissolving hills.

All this has been tried in every part of the civilized world, with the same unvarying result. There appears to be serious danger that these disastrous and fatal experiments will be repeated in our treatment of the mountain forests of the western part of our country; but as the forests now belong to the nation they should be effectively guarded against the short-sighted selfishness which would thus ruin them, and, by destroying them, forever prevent the development of the regions along the course of the streams below.

The plan proposed by "Garden and Forest" for the protection of these important forests embraces three essential features.

The first is the immediate withdrawal from sale of all forest lands belonging to the nation.

The second step is to commit to the United States army the care and guardianship of the nation's forests. It is shown in the article referred to that there is in

time of peace no other work of national defense or protection so valuable as this which the army can perform, and that the national forests cannot be adequately guarded and protected by any other means. It is obvious that the measures which have been tried, including those now in operation, or nominally in operation, have proved almost entirely ineffective. The officers of the army are picked men, educated at the expense of the nation, and already in its paid service.

The third step in this plan is the appointment by the President of" a commission to make a thorough examination of the condition of the forests belonging to the nation, and of their relation to the agricultural interests of the regions through which the streams flow which have their sources in these forests, and to report with the facts observed a comprehensive plan for the preservation and management of the public forests, including a system for the training, by the Government, of a sufficient number of foresters for the national forest service. . . . A National School of Forestry should be established at a suitable place in one of the great mountain forests on the public lands, and its equipment should be as thorough and adequate for its purpose as is that of the National Military Academy at West Point."

The plan thus proposed has the merit of being practical, and of providing the means and instruments for its own effective and successful administration.

Nothing else at once so direct and efficient, and so thoroughly adapted to accomplish these most important objects, has hitherto been presented for the consideration and action of the American people in connection with this department of our national interests. It should be adopted and put in operation as soon as possible.

The Dark Continent.

FROM the beginning of time, men have been accustomed to associate with the name of Africa only such conceptions as darkness, ignorance, helplessness, and the opportunity of oppression. Sir John Hawkins and the Roman conqueror of centuries before may have had little else in common, but they agreed in their belief that Africa and the Africans were fair game, the storehouse from which were to be drawn supplies of slaves, and in which Rob Roy's was the only law.

Since the Pharaohs' kingdom, with its supplies of grain to the Mediterranean region, and Carthage, with its more universal commercial intercourse, international relations have for centuries felt hardly any disturbing influences from the side of Africa, with the exception of the den of pirates so long permitted to exist in the Barbary States. Lord Salisbury's recent invidious speech about "black men" and their implied incapacity for national or international affairs, though applied to Hindus, was merely another curious survival of the feeling of absolute contempt bred from centuries of supreme international indifference to everything African except the plunder of Africa. This indifference was the product of the feeling that international interests and the balance of power were purely European affairs, a feeling which does not really date from the struggles of William and Louis, but from time immemorial,- from that time, at least, when the headlong retreat of the Persian from the shores of Greece VOL. XXXVIII.—41.

gave the first great shock to rudimentary international relations. From that time international law has virtually been founded on the notion that international rights were confined to the nations of Europe, while the nations of other continents had at best only international privileges.

One may well fancy the rudeness of the shock that would have been given to this notion by the appearance and geometrical increase of the great American Republic but for the self-control of the latter power. Silas Deane's wish for three thousand miles of fire between Europe and America has been pretty fairly fulfilled so far as international law is concerned; and diplomacy has been permitted to assume that the center and circumference of all its real rights and interests are in Europe. It has often been wondered that American diplomacy should have been so constantly successful; perhaps the wonder would be less if one could weigh exactly the natural desire of the diplomacy of the old school to maintain the status quo in order to neutralize its American rival by granting all the latter's reasonable demands, and thus to retain to itself the appearance of its ancient exclusiveness.

Circumstances seem to be forming new combinations to shock the solidity of the status quo. Not only are torpedo-boats, iron-clads, and perfected weapons and munitions at the service of any government that has money to buy them, but some governments, once accounted only barbarous, have come to know and value these tools of destruction and to use them as a defense. The Japanese army and navy must now be reckoned with by Russia and England in any general war in which these two rivals take part. China, which once relied on junks, gingals, and stink-pots for the extermination of the foreign devils, now patrols her own seas with well-appointed squadrons of ironclads, and doubtless will not wait for European permission to take advantage of the earliest opportunity to settle up several long-standing accounts. Cases of the kind are numerous and striking, though those who talk so glibly of a "general European war " seem to ignore them and to imagine that international circumstances have not changed since the general European peace was made in 1815.

The share of the Dark Continent in the new circumstances thus far has been mainly commercial. He who can teach the black man to want and wear one shirt where none was worn before brings a wide and welcome increase to the markets of European producers; and it is shameful to be compelled to add that Christian nations have found a still richer mine in fastening upon Africa the love for distilled liquors. Under such auspices the Congo State has been born; but is it certain or probable that this is to be the end of all for Africa? Everything seems to portend an epoch of European colonization in the Dark Continent, modeled on the Congo State; but there are some considerations to the contrary.

Africa, like every other continent, has races of every type. It has its races of cowards, and its militant, conquering peoples. In the natural process, the former should go down and the latter come to the surface of things. We are apt to judge all Africans by the former type. But Lord Wolseley should know the black man as a fighter, if any one does; and he has recently

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