They had been fed in childhood and youth upon the memories and traditions of American history; they had learned well the lesson that the battle is not always to the strong; they did not forget those dark hours of the American Revolution when Washington, with a small, ragged and mutinous army, lay at Valley Forge while the British occupied New York and Philadelphia and were threatening to overrun Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas. It was their fixed belief that their own cause in this Confederate war was identical with that of their Revolutionary forefathers, and they would have held themselves in contempt had they shown a readier spirit of surrender than that of the earlier Americans. They remembered how even after the British had conquered Charleston and Savannah, and with superior forces had overrun Georgia and the Carolinas, some mere handfuls of determined men under Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Horry and their kind, had kept war alive in those regions until such time as Greene should come and by masterful strategy make his own defeats more effective than victories, and ultimately reconquer their country from its conquerors, thus making American independence possible. The Confederate people, in their manhood, believed in and acted upon that American history which they had learned in their youth. Reverses only stimulated them to new endeavors, and a more heroic endurance. Finally, there remained the Army of Northern Virginia, under command of Robert E. Lee. For them to have abandoned their cause while such an army under such a commander was still in the field would have been a confession of weakness and cowardice wholly beyond conception by such men. The war was not yet over. The men who were fighting it on the side of the South were still so potent in arms that in that very month of July, 1863, the Government of the United States found it necessary to resort to an enforced draft in order to raise the 300,000 men called for three months before, to reinforce armies that already outnumbered those of the South by two to one and more. So far was the Confederacy at that time from defeat and the necessity of surrender that for a space it was exceedingly uncertain whether or not the North would furnish the quotas now called for. So small was the confidence of the North in the administration, and in the success of its methods, that in some parts of the country volunteering had practically come to an end.