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boys and girls of a large parish. What putting on the toga virilis was to a Roman youth, what buying the first fan is to a Spanish girl, what "coming out" is to our sisters, what presentation at court is to our English highborn cousins, so is the "first communion" to French boys and girls. It taken, they are men and women. Is iron fortune theirs? After "first communion" they must set to work; life's race has begun. It is the great family festival. All persons do not figure as bride or groom, but all persons (at least it was the rule before war was declared on religion) take the "first communion." Girls are robed as brides, but trinkets are forbidden. The utmost purity of appearance is sought, to give all spectators "the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace." Each girl wears a white veil, and her hair, no matter how luxuriant, or blue black, or Venetian auburn, is held a close prisoner in a white cap, though the head have right to duchess diadem; the dress is muslin and as white as the veil; the waist girdled by a broad white ribbon ending in a large bow-knot behind. Boys wear white trousers, waistcoat, cravat, gloves, and an armlet of broad white ribbon tied in a large bow-knot, while from both ends hangs long gold or silver fringe; black

*Until 1882, girls too bore lighted tapers. The transept viewed from behind the high altar was a striking scene. Tapers' flames seemed like St. Elmo's lights hovering over the boys and girls, and might easily be taken for the Spirit falling from heaven on purity, blessing it and fitting it for the good fight in life's

coat; hair as well dressed as the nearest barber's skill can go; hat left at home. In one hand is held a missal, and a white rosary ending in a cross; in the other, a long white wax taper with a red velvet gold-trimmed holder round it.* Girls and boys wear these clothes at confirmation and at "renewal," which takes place a year afterward, though the armlet is discarded from the boy's arm at "renewal." Where poverty is unable to provide this livery of heaven, wealth supplies not only the dress but the substantial meal which adds memories to the day, for round the board all kindred are assembled often for the first, oftener for the last, time. The day ended, boy's armlet and girl's white reticule are put in a paper box and are laid in a secure corner of a chest of drawers, to be joined in time by the bride's garter or her orange wreath as souvenirs of life's great days. The church to which grandma and kinswomen are wending their way in our illustration is St. Médard, the parish church of Mouffetard Quarter- the parish church of the famous Gobelins tapestry manufactory and of the Garden of Plants. It has twice been inundated with blood in our day-in June, 1848, in May, 1871.

J. D. Osborne.

battle to be begun to-morrow. In 1881, a girl in St. Sulpice Church set her veil on fire, and there came nigh being a catastrophe fatal to as many as that at Lima, Peru, a few years since. Calamity was averted by a priest, who in putting out the fire was seriously burned. Since then no tapers have been intrusted to girls.

W

EMMA LAZARUS.

JHEN on thy bed of pain thou layest low
Daily we saw thy body fade away,

Nor could the love wherewith we loved thee stay
For one dear hour the flesh borne down by woe;

But as the mortal sank, with what white glow

Flamed thy eternal spirit, night and day,Untouched, unwasted, though the crumbling clay Lay wrecked and ruined! Ah, is it not so, Dear poet-comrade, who from sight hast gone,— Is it not so that spirit hath a life

Death may not conquer? But, O dauntless one! Still must we sorrow. Heavy is the strife

NOVEMBER 19, 1887.

VOL. XXXV.— 79.

And thou not with us,--- thou of the old race
That with Jehovah parleyed, face to face.

R. W. G.

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THE GRAND STRATEGY OF THE WAR OF THE REBELLION.

BY GENERAL W. T. SHERMAN.

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WENTY-TWO years have passed since the termination of the civil war in America; a new generation of men has the destiny of our country in their possession, and we who probably lag superfluous on the stage watch with jealous interest the drift of public opinion and of public events. These are mainly guided by self-interest, by prejudice, by the teachings of books, magazines, and newspapers.

We veterans believe that in 1861-5 we fought a holy war, with absolute right on our side, with pure patriotism, with reasonable skill, and that we achieved a result which enabled the United States of America to resume her glorious career in the interest of all mankind, after an interruption of four years by as needless a war as ever afflicted a people.

The causes which led up to that war have been well described by Mr. Greeley, Dr. Draper, Mr. Blaine, and General Logan-the opposite side by Mr. Davis, Governor Foote, General Johnston, and the recent biographers of General Lee. In addition to these, innumerable volumes have been published, and nearly all the leading magazines of our country have added most interesting narratives of events, conspicuously so THE CENTURY. The editors of this magazine, armed with a personal letter from General Grant, applied long ago to have me assist them in their laudable purpose. I declined, but the pendulum of time seems to have swung too far in the wrong direction: one is likely to receive the impression that

the civil war was only a scramble for power by mobs, and not a war of high principle, guided by men of great intelligence according to the best light they possessed. Discovering that one branch of the history of that war, "Grand Strategy," has been overlooked or slighted by writers, I have undertaken to discuss it, not with any hope to do full justice to the subject, but to attract the attention of younger and stronger men to follow up and elaborate it to the end.

War is the conflict of arms between peoples for some real or fancied object. It has existed from the beginning. The Bible is full of it. Homer immortalized the siege and destruction of Troy. Grecian, Roman, and European history is chiefly made up of wars and the deeds of soldiers; out of their experience arose certain rules, certain principles, which made the "art of war" as practiced by Alexander, by Cæsar, by Gustavus Adolphus, and by Frederick the Great.

These principles are as true as the multiplication table, the law of gravitation, of virtual velocities, or of any other invariable rule of natural philosophy. The " art of war" has grown to be the "science of war," and probably reached its summit in the wars of Europe from 1789 to 1815. Its fundamental principles are as clearly defined as are those of the laws of England by Blackstone. Jomini may be assumed as the father of the modern science of war, and he has been supplemented by "great masters" such as Napoleon, Marmont, Wellington, Napier, Hamley, Soady, Chesney, and others, all of whom agree in the fundamental principles; but to me the treatise of France J. Soady,

Lieutenant-Colonel, R. A., published in London, 1870, seems easiest of reference and best suited to my purpose, because he admits the elements of local prejudice and the temperament of the people to enter into the problem of war.

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Lieutenant-Colonel Soady divides the "lessons of war as taught by the great masters' into the following heads:

1. Statesmanship in its relationship to war. 2. Strategy, or the art of properly directing masses upon the theater of war, either for offense or invasion. 3. Grand tactics. 4. Logistics, or the art of moving armies. 5. Engineering - the attack and defense of fortifications. 6. Minor tactics.

He further subdivides these "heads," and illustrates by historic examples the following branches: "Aim and principles," "Lines of communication," ""Zone of operations,' ‚""Of fensive and defensive warfare," Fortresses, Battle, Modern improvement in arms, Steamboats and Railroads, the Telegraph; and indeed more nearly approaches the science of war as it exists to-day than any author of whom I have knowledge. Any non-professional reader who will cast his eyes over the 555 pages of Lieutenant-Colonel Soady's volume, as well as those of "The Operations of War," by Colonel (now General) Hamley, will discover that war as well as peace has a large field in the affairs of this world, demanding as much if not more study than most of the sciences in which the human mind is interested. Every man who does to his neighbor as he wishes his neighbor should do unto him finds on examining the law of the day that he has been a law-abiding citizen; so a soldier or general who goes straight to his object with courage and intelligence will find that he has been a scientific soldier according to the doctrines laid down by the great masters. Many of us in our civil war did not think of Jomini, Napoleon, Wellington, Hamley, or Soady; yet, as we won the battle, we are willing to give these great authors the benefit of our indorsement.

Now in the United States of America, in the year of our Lord 1861, some ambitious men of the Southern States, for their own reasons, good or bad, resolved to break up the union of States which had prospered beyond precedent, which by political means they had governed, but on which they were about to lose their hold. By using the pretext of slavery which existed at the South they aroused their people to a very frenzy, seceded (or their States seceded) from the Union, and established a Southern Confederacy, the capital of which was first at Montgomery, Alabama, afterwards at Richmond, Virginia, with Jefferson

Davis as their president. By a conspiracy as clearly established as any fact in history, they seized all the property of the United States within the seceded States, except a few feebly garrisoned forts along the seaboard, and proclaimed themselves a new nation, with slavery the corner-stone. Old England, the first modern nation to abolish slavery and to enforce the noble resolve that no man could put his foot on English soil without "co instante" becoming a free man, looked on with complacency, and encouraged this enormous crime of rebellion.

The people of the Northern free States, accustomed to the usual criminations of our system of elections, supposed this to be a mere incident of the presidential election of the previous November; went along in their daily vocations in the full belief that this episode would pass away as others had done; and treated the idea of civil war in this land of freedom as a pure absurdity.

In due time, March 4, 1861, the new President, Abraham Lincoln, was installed as the President of the United States. He found the seven cotton-States in a condition which they called "out of the Union," claiming absolute independence, and seeking to take into their confederacy every State which tolerated slavery. In the end they succeeded, except with Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, so that in the spring of 1861, April 12th, when the Southern Confederacy began actual war by bombarding Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, it awakened a response which even they could not misunderstand.

The people of the United States loved their Government and their history; they realized perfectly the advantages they possessed over the inhabitants of other lands, but had no army or navy adequate to meet so grave a crisis. The boom of the cannon in Charleston Harbor was carried by electricity to every city, town, and village of the land, and the citizens realized for the first time that civil war was upon them; they were told to form themselves into companies and regiments, and to go with all expedition to Washington, the national capital, to defend the civil authorities and the archives of government. This done, the cry went up, "On to Richmond!" and the battle of Bull Run resulted. The South was better prepared than the North, and victory went to the former, according to the estab lished rules of war. Had Johnston or Beauregard pushed their success and occupied Washington, it would not have changed the final result, because twenty millions of freemen would never have submitted tamely to the domination of the slave-holder faction. Johnston himself records that his army was as much

confused and disordered as ours, both being green and badly organized and disciplined.

Then began the real preparation. Soady quotes from Napoleon: "When a nation is without establishments and a military system, it is difficult to organize an army.' We found this perfectly true; yet the people of the United States, on the call of their President, organized voluntarily three hundred regiments of a thousand men each, which were distributed to the places of immediate danger. Soady says further: "Although wars of opinion, national wars and civil wars are sometimes confounded, they differ enough to require separate notice. . . . In a military sense these wars are fearful, since the invading force not only is met by the armies of the enemy, but is exposed to the attacks of an exasperated people."

The very nature of the case required the North to invade the South, to recover possession of the forts, arsenals, dock-yards, mints, post-routes, and public property which had been wrongfully appropriated by the public enemy. We had not only to meet and conquer the armies and the exasperated people of the South, but the obstacles of nature woods, marshes, rivers, mountains-and the climate of a region nearly as large as all Europe.

Omitting the States of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri (3,024,745), which supplied each belligerent a fair quota, the Northern States had a population of 19,089,944 to 9,103,332 in the Confederate States. In the autumn of 1861, these faced each other in angry controversy, the North resolved to maintain the Union, and the South to establish a separate government, necessarily hostile to it. Each side maintained throughout the same form of government, with a president elected by the people as their chief magistrate and commander-in-chief of the army and navy, with a cabinet of his choice to assist in the administration of government, a congress to enact the laws and provide the ways and means, and a supreme court to sit in judgment on those laws. Both parties, following common precedents, raised their armies by the same methods first by volunteering, and then by a draft of citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, induced by bounties or enforced by severe penalties. At first the Southern youth were clamorous to be led against the detested Yankees and Abolitionists, each claiming to be equal to five of the

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shop-keepers and mud-sills of the North; but they soon became convinced that man to man was all they wanted.

According to Captain Frederick Phisterer, in his valuable "Statistical Record of the Armies (1883), the "calls" on the North for men were, in the four years of war, 2,763,670, which resulted in an aggregate of 2,772,408; † but as these calls were for three months, one year, two years, three years, and "during the war," the actual soldiers are counted two, three, and four times.

On p. 62 occurs a table, which every officer who has had to fight with men present for duty, instead of on paper, well understands, in which is given, "Present":

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and on the latter date 202,709 absent — aggregating 1,000,516 on the muster-rolls at the end of the war. I have no doubt this is as correct as possible.

The "absent" were not present with the armies at the front, but were generally in rear of the base of supplies; and even of the "present" we had to estimate at least one-third as detached, guarding our long lines of supplies, sick in hospital, company cooks, teamsters, escorts to trains, and absent from the ranks by reason of the many causes incident to war.

Assuming one soldier to sixteen of the population,- at times more, at times less, the Southern armies must have had an average of 569,000 men. I cannot find even an approximate table of their numbers; but we know they had in their ranks every man they could get, subject to the same causes of absenteeism as the Union armies.

Before I enter upon the real subject of this paper, let me attempt to portray the two great leaders of these mighty hosts, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, both of whom, in addition to their civil functions, often exercised their unquestioned right to command their respective armies. They, in fact, commissioned all general officers, assigned them to posts, gave military orders, defined the "objects" of campaigns, and often the exact "lines of operation."

than those supplied by the adjutant-general, and are offered in this paper only as approximate, to illustrate the argument and demonstrate the magnitude of these "operations of war."-W. T. S.

A recent officially revised statement increases this number to 2,778,304.- Editor.

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Lincoln was by nature and choice a man of peace. Born in Kentucky, but taken by his parents in early youth to Indiana and Illinois, he grew up to manhood the type of the class of people who inhabit our North-west. He in time became a lawyer in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, had a fair practice, and always took a lively interest in all public questions in other words, "politics." He became skilled in debate, and during the discussions which arose from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the extension of slavery over the vast territories acquired by the Mexican war of 1846-8, he was compelled to meet in debate one of the ablest men of his day, Stephen A. Douglas, whom he fairly excelled, whereby he acquired national fame; was, according to the usage of our country, nominated as the Republican candidate for President, and was duly and fairly elected in November, 1860. At that time he was somewhat a stranger to the country, especially to the South, who regarded him as an Abolitionist, then the vilest of mortals in their estimation. But no sooner was he legally inducted into his office, March 4, 1861, than he began to display those qualities of head and heart which will make him take rank with the most renowned men of earth. He never professed any knowledge of the laws and science of war, yet in his joyous moments he would relate his large experience as a soldier in the Black Hawk war of 1832, and as an officer in the Mormon war at Nauvoo, in 1846. Nevertheless, during the progress of the civil war he evinced a quick comprehension of the principles of the "art," though never using military phraseology. Thus his letter of April 19, 1862, to General McClellan, then besieging Yorktown, exhibits a precise knowledge of the strength and purpose of each of the many armies in the field, and of the importance of "concentric action." In his letter of June 5, 1863, to General Hooker, he wrote:

In one word, I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river [Rappahannock], like an ox jumped half-way over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way, or to kick the other.

Again, June 10, 1863, writing to General

Hooker:

If left to me, I would not go south of the Rappa hannock upon Lee's moving north of it. If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days. Meanwhile your communications, and with them your army, would be ruined. I think Lee's army and not Richmond is your objective point. If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow him on his flank and on the inside track, shortening your lines while he lengthens his. If he stop, fret him and fret him.

This is pure science, though the language is not technical.

It is related by General Grant in his memoirs that when he was explaining how he proposed to use the several scattered armies so as to accomplish the best results, referring to the forces in western Virginia, and saying that he had ordered Sigel to move up the Valley of Virginia from Winchester, make junction with Crook and Averell from Kanawha, and go towards Saltville or Lynchburg- Mr. Lincoln said, "Oh, yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can't skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does."

In his personal interview with General Grant about March 8, 1864, Mr. Lincoln recounted truly and manfully that he had never professed to be a military man, or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them; but the procrastination of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, which was always with him, forced him to issuing his series of military orders, one, two, three, etc. He did not know but all were wrong, and did know that some were. All he wanted or ever had wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the Government in rendering such assistance. At last he had found that man.

Jefferson Davis also was born in Kentucky. He removed in youth to the State of Mississippi, whence he was appointed a cadet to the United States Military Academy at West Point, September 1, 1824. He was graduated No. 23 in a class of 33 members in June, 1828; served on the North-west frontier, now Wisconsin and Iowa, as a lieutenant of the First Infantry, till March 4, 1833, when he was appointed to the First Dragoons as a first lieutenant; with that regiment he served on the frontier of Arkansas, now Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory, till he resigned, in 1835. He was in civil life in his State of Mississippi till the breaking out of the Mexican war, in 1846, when, as colonel of a Mississippi regiment, he took a conspicuous part under General Zachary Taylor at Monterey and at Buena Vista, where he was badly wounded.

With the disbandment of his regiment he resumed his civil and political career; was a senator in the National Congress, 1847-53; Secretary of War under President Pierce, 1853-57; and again a senator, from 1857 to 1861, when he became the President of the Southern Con

federacy, and Commander-in-chief of its armies and navy.

He was by nature and education a soldier, giving orders to his armies, laying down plans of campaign, lines of operation, and descending into details which it might have been wiser to have left to subordinates.

No one has ever questioned the personal integrity of Mr. Davis, but we his antagonists have ever held him as impersonating a bad

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