Without war, but with the Southern States held within the Union, sentiment in the North would have been favorable to a compromise which would have prevented the extension of slavery; and events would surely have brought about a gradual liberation of the blacks in the South, as events soon ended slavery in Brazil and Cuba. The institution was doomed, morally and economically. But there would have been no negro suffrage. That was enforced by conditions which grew out of the war. The South would not have been impoverished, and it could have afforded a gradual education of the negro in such a way as to fit him for free industry, and, in a limited way, for the exercise of the suffrage. There would have been no disturbing reversal of the position of the two races, to be followed by a violent restoration of white supremacy and an accompanying development of inveterate hostility between whites and blacks. The sections would not have drifted apart in industrial conditions and social constitution as they did under the influence of the war; we should not have had, perhaps, a money-mad North to counterbalance a ruined, desolated, disheartened South. And where, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, at Fredericksburg, at Chattanooga, and on many humbler fields, the flags wave over the even ranks of myriads of soldier graves, the mocking-birds would sing in thickets which the bullet's hiss and the shriek of the shell had never profaned, while their teeming populations of dead men would either be alive to-day or entombed among their loved ones after lives of peaceful usefulness. CHAPTER XXI IF THE CONFEDERATES HAD MARCHED ON WASHINGTON AFTER BULL RUN There have been a great many attempts to excuse or minimize the failure of General Joseph E. Johnston to follow up the tremendous Confederate victory won by his second in command, General G. T. Beauregard, at Bull Run, July 21, 1861. That the Federal army was beaten literally to a pulp there can be no doubt. General Irwin McDowell, who commanded the Union forces, officially reported, after the battle, that all his troops were in flight "in a state of utter disorganization." "They could not," he wired on July 22d, "be prepared for action by to-morrow morning even were they willing. The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized." They were actually running away in such a state of panic that they could not get away, for commissary and ammunition wagons, congressmen's and other spectators' horses and carriages, artillery and sutlers' wagons were blocking the road, and panicstricken soldiers were falling over one another. When General McClellan came to take command after McDowell had been superseded, he reported this state of affairs: "I found no army to command--a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by defeat."