"
"Wisconsin?" said the planter, "Wisconsin? Where is Wisconsin?"
"It is one of the States of the North-west," said Sherman.
"When I was studying geography," said the planter, "I knew of Wisconsin
simply as the name of a tribe of Indians. How many men are there in a
regiment?"
"Well, there were a thousand when they started," said Sherman.
"Do you mean to say," said the planter, "that there is a State called
Wisconsin that has sent thirty thousand men into your armies?"
"Oh, probably forty thousand," answered Sherman.
With the next battalion the questions and the answers are repeated. The
flag was that of a Minnesota regiment, say the 32d. The old planter had
never heard that there was such a State.
"My God!" he said when he had figured out the thousands of men who had
come to the front, from these so-called Indian territories, to maintain
the existence of the nation, "If we in the South had known that you had
turned those Indian territories into great States, we never should have
gone into this war." The incident throws a light upon the state of mind
of men in the South, even of well educated men in the South, at the
outbreak of the War. They might, of course, have known by statistics
that great States had grown up in the North-west, representing a
population of millions and able themselves to put into the field armies
to be counted by the thousand.
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