none are recalled, and while this fidelity is
proof of the peaceable character of the negro, it is also evidence for
their owners that slavery had produced no personal hostilities between
the two races in Loudoun County, and that the treatment of the negro
by his owner under the law had been such as to maintain between them
personal attachment and mutual confidence. Many negroes accompanied
their owners to the seat of war, not to take part in battle, but to
serve in semi-military duties without exposure to danger. Some of them
marched in Maryland and Pennsylvania with the armies of Lee,
voluntarily returning, although they might have remained in the free
States without hindrance. They are still proud of the conduct of their
race in those days of anxiety and peril.

The proclamation of President Lincoln was regarded in Virginia as a
strictly political war measure, designed to place the cause of war
distinctly upon the sole question of slavery for an effect to be
produced upon foreign countries and with the purpose of making use of
negroes as soldiers in the Federal army. The issue of negro freedom
had not been distinctly made until this proclamation created it.
Hitherto it had been understood that, at the furthest, the Federal
authorities would insist only on restriction of slavery to the limits
where it already existed and a gradual emancipation upon payment of
the value of slaves held at the beginning of the war. But now it was
settled that the United States proposed to enforce by arms an
instantaneous emancipation without compensation.

_Close of the War._

The half-clad and impoverished southern armies, after four years of
valiant fighting, were no longer able to withstand the superior
numbers that had confronted them with merciless regularity in every
important conflict of the war, and, in April, 1865, the struggle
ceased with the complete subjugation of the Southland.

All that the States-rights supporters had prophesied would be
accomplished if unresisted; all that the Unionists had indignantly
denied to be the objects of the war was accomplished: the South was
conquered, State sovereignty repudiated, the slaves were freed, and
the recognition of negro political equality forced upon the nation.

Neighborhood strifes and animosities had been engendered in every
village and hamlet, and in nearly every household mothers wept for the
lost darlings asleep in their unmarked graves. The women and children,
heari