d towards the enemy, not all were
incapacitated by physical suffering. Many, without going through the
formality of asking leave, were making for their homes, and had no
idea that their conduct was in any way peculiar. They had done their
duty in more than one battle, they had been long absent from their
farms, their equipment was worn out, the enemy had been driven from
Virginia, and they considered that they were fully entitled to some
short repose. And amongst these, whose only fault was an imperfect
sense of their military obligations, was the residue of cowards and
malingerers shed by every great army engaged in protracted operations.

Lee had been joined by the divisions of D.H. Hill, McLaws, Walker,
and by Hampton's cavalry, and the strength of his force should have
been 65,000 effectives.* (* Calculated on the basis of the Field
Returns dated July 20, 1862, with the addition of Jackson's and
Ewell's divisions, and subtracting the losses (10,000) of the
campaign against Pope.) But it was evident that these numbers could
not be long maintained. The men were already accustomed to
half-rations of green corn, and they would be no worse off in
Maryland and Pennsylvania, untouched as yet by the ravages of war,
than in the wasted fields of Virginia. The most ample commissariat,
however, would not compensate for the want of boots and the want of
rest, and a campaign of invasion was certain to entail an amount of
hard marching to which the strength of the troops was hardly equal.
Not only had the South to provide from her seven millions of white
population an army larger than that of Imperial France, but from a
nation of agriculturists she had to provide another army of craftsmen
and mechanics to enable the soldiers to keep the field. For guns and
gun-carriages, powder and ammunition, clothing and harness, gunboats
and torpedoes, locomotives and railway plant, she was now dependent
on the hands of her own people and the resources of her own soil; the
organisation of those resources, scattered over a vast extent of
territory, was not to be accomplished in the course of a few months,
nor was the supply of skilled labour sufficient to fill the ranks of
her industrial army. By the autumn of 1862, although the strenuous
efforts of every Government department gave the lie to the idea, not
uncommon in the North, that the Southern character was shiftless and
the Southern intellect slow, so little real progress had been made
that