Eclectic History of the United States. 285
in the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan" had stripped Northern arsenals to supply the South with arms, had scattered the navy in order to par- alize the " National Government," and had really brought it about that the South was better prepared for the war than the North. This is a favorite theory with Northern writers, it is fully brought out in such books as Greely, Draper, Lossing, Moore's Rebellion Record and Badeau, which the author advises our children to read, and we are not surprised that she adopts it.
This theory is, of course, utterly untrue, and would seem to need no labored refutation ; but if any one desires to go into the matter more fully, let him read the article on Confederate Ordnance, by the able and accomplished chief of the Department, General J. Gorgas, pub- lished in the January-February, '84, number of our Southern His- torical Society Papers, and they will find a thorough refutation of this slander, a precise statement of the very small number of arms with which the Confederacy begun the war, and a clear account of how we were not only without arms, but without arsenals, armories, founderies, percussion cap manufactories, machinery, powder mills, material, or even skilled workmen.
And when it is remembered that the white population upon which the Confederacy could draw was even nominally but a little more than 7,000,000 — but really only 5,000,000 — whilie the Northern Govern- ment had a white population of more than 20,000,000, with the rest of the world as their recruiting ground, that the North was the great manufacturing region, and that the Northwest was accustomed to fur- nish the cotton States with the bulk of their provisions, it seems amazing for any one to argue that the South was in any respect better prepared for war than the North, save in the morale of her sol- diers and the patriotic devotion of her noble women.
5. We insist that it is untrue as stated (p. 277) that Missouri, Ken- tucky and Maryland " refused to secede^' in the light of General Lyon's operations in Missouri, the arrest and imprisonment of the secession members of the Maryland Legislature, and the pinning of Kentucky to the Union by Federal bayonets.
6. All of the ingenious twisting possible cannot make the account of the Baltimore riot (p. 277) fair, in view of the well-established facts that the troops fired first on the citizens, in response to their jeers and the throwing of several stones from the crowd, and that the at- tempt to make this Massachusetts regiment the representatives of the patriots who were fired on by British soldiers at Lexington in 1775, exacdy reverses and falsifies the truth of history. These Massachu-
