The estimates of the numbers of men engaged on both sides by Ropes, Rhodes, and especially T. L. Livermore in his _Numbers and Losses_, are most trustworthy, though this is a subject still hotly controverted in both North and South. Each of the great battles has its historian: H. V. Boynton, _The Battle of Chickamauga_, and Morris Schaff, _The Battle of the Wilderness_, being the best examples.
The distressing news of Bull Run brought home to the North the awful realities of war. Men who had all along distrusted the Republican party now denounced a war waged for the emancipation of the South's slaves. Both the President and Congress formally announced that it was a struggle for the maintenance of the Union and not a war on behalf of the slaves. It was well that this position was taken, else the North might have broken into impotent factions. The East hated the South and warred upon their ancient rivals, the planters; the border States owned slaves, disliked the Republican party, and feared the purposes of those in power; while the West loved the Union, held the negro in contempt, and was committed to the party in power on the smallest possible margin.
None but Lincoln seemed to possess the tact and the ability necessary to hold together these dissolving elements of a country never yet thoroughly united; and even he was long doubted and distrusted by many good men. Strange as it may seem, Douglas had been, until his death, June 3, 1861, his right arm. Douglas's last speeches and dying words urged upon the millions of his followers the necessity of giving their lives to the cause of the Union. So critical was the situation that when nominations were made for elective office in the Middle States or the West in 1861, the Administration party took pains to disavow its former attitude and put forward candidates who had been regular Democrats, thus following the same compromising policy which Davis inaugurated in the South. Daniel S. Dickinson, a member of the old Polk and Pierce party of ruthless expansion, was made leader of the Administration forces in New York in 1861, and David Tod, a stanch Douglas man in 1860, was elected Governor of Ohio the same year by Republican votes. John C. Frémont was removed from the command of the Federal army in St. Louis because he undertook to emancipate the slaves in his department. The people of the North were not willing to invade the sister States of the South for any other cause than to restore the Union. Wealthy bankers, industrial leaders, and railway magnates might be kept together on a platform of enlarging the area of their operations, but never on a program which proposed the confiscation of billions of dollars' worth of property, which the slaves represented. In this hour of trial the supreme need was coöperation and union among the diverse elements of the North, for in 1862 another Congress would be chosen, and if party lines were suffered to be drawn, the South would certainly gain her independence.