on. Party lines and class distinctions disappeared. Two hundred
thousand volunteers offered their services to Jefferson Davis;
confederate and state bonds to meet the expense of the war were taken at
par wherever there was surplus money; men met at their courthouses to
drill without the call of their officers; and women, even more
enthusiastic than the men, urged their "guardians and protectors" to the
front to meet and vanquish a foe who threatened to invade the Southern
soil. Armories were quickly constructed in a country which knew little
of the mechanic arts; guns and ammunition were ordered from Europe and
from Northern manufacturers as fast as trusty agents could make
arrangements; shipbuilding was resorted to on the banks of the sluggish
rivers; and machinists and sailors were imported from the North and from
England to guide the amateurish hands of the South. Before midsummer
four hundred thousand Southerners were in arms or waiting to receive
them. Colonel Robert E. Lee, accounted the first soldier of the country,
was made a general in the new army. Joseph E. Johnston, Albert Sidney
Johnston, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, and others accepted with confidence
the commissions of the South, and set hundreds of younger men, trained
at West Point or at the Virginia Military Institute, to drilling and
organizing the armies rapidly gathering at strategic points along the
frontier, which extended from Norfolk, Virginia, to the eastern border
of Kansas.

The planters had at last made good their threat, and the aristocratic
society of the South was welded together more firmly than it had ever
been before. Their leaders frankly stated to the world that their four
billions of negro property was of more importance to them than any
federal union which threatened the value of that property by narrowing
the limits of its usefulness. The negroes knew a great war was beginning
and that they were the objects of contention; but long discipline and a
curious pride in the prowess of their masters kept them at their lowly
but important tasks. They boasted that their masters could "whip the
world in arms." Of insurrections and the massacre of the whites, which
at one time had been a nightmare to the ruling classes of the South,
there was no rumor. And throughout the four years of war the slaves
remained faithful and produced by their steady, if slow, toil the food
supplies both for the people at home and for the armies at the front.

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