I have quoted Colonel Henderson's admiring comment on the size of the army the South was able to put in the field. In doing so I have not forgotten that he estimates that army at 900,000. But his judgment upon that point loses much of its weight when we observe that in two distinct passages in his Life of Stonewall Jackson he gives seven millions as the white population of the South, instead of five millions, as it actually was. This error may serve to show how easy it is for a foreign critic to be mistaken upon a question of statistics. Apart from the influence upon his judgment of his error as to the size of the white population, it is evident, from the passage quoted above, that Henderson included in the estimate of 900,000 many thousands of men detailed for the various industries he enumerates.[4] I submit then that these preliminary considerations quite do away with the presumption that an army of only six hundred thousand men serving with the colors, would have been unworthy of the devotion or the patriotism of the Southern people, or inadequate to what might have been expected of a nation of five millions of whites. In other words, we enter upon our argument without any reasonable presumption against the conclusion which it is our purpose to defend. Whoever will fairly consider that the South had to provide out of her indigenous male population of military age, a fighting army, an industrial army, and an army of civil servants, will not be surprised if it shall appear from the evidence available that she was not able to muster in battle array more than six hundred thousand men. AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF OUR CONCLUSION We arrive at the result indicated above by several independent lines of evidence. I.--Our figures are supported by the statements of a number of men who were in position to know what was the total effective strength of the Southern armies. Among them were General Cooper, adjutant-general of the Confederate armies, writing in 1869 (see "Southern Historical Society Papers," Vol. vii, p. 287); Dr. A. T. Bledsoe, Assistant Secretary of War; General John Preston, chief of the Conscription Bureau; Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens ("War Between the States," 1870, Vol. ii, p. 630); General Jubal A. Early ("Southern Historical Papers," Vol. ii, p. 20); Dr. Joseph Jones (official report, June, 1890, "Southern Historical Society Papers," xix, 14), and General Marcus J. Wright--who now, however, puts the numbers at 700,000 ("Southern Historical Society Papers," xix, 254). I ask what better authorities on this subject could be named than the adjutant-general of the army, the Assistant Secretary of War, and the chief of the Conscription Bureau of the Confederate States?