ing reliability and significance exist for all the northern states. These figures are indeed striking. Only two states, Wisconsin and Vermont (or Connecticut) show increases, all the others show decreases, often startling. When one considers that the later date is 1870, when the more immediate results of the war had passed away, and when one considers also the figures which show the naturally expected deficiency in the actual number of children born in the war years, one realizes the awful cost of the war in stunting the new generation.

As to the habits, and the spiritual and the physical condition of the men demobilized, one can judge only by evidences still less direct. The men did learn to wear ready-made clothes; they did not become militaristic in their ideas. No generation has existed in the United States so fundamentally opposed to war and to territorial expansion; never before was the army brought down to so small a percentage of the population, so little attention given to the militia, and the navy allowed so rapidly to dwindle away; the military training so toilfully acquired was used chiefly to make political processions gay. Some did become unsettled and lawless, but the attempt to proportion the amount of disorder between that resulting from frontier characteristics, and that from the war, is apparently quite futile. The overwhelming majority settled down to the quiet life of ordinary citizens, except that some greater proportion than usual felt, as did Dr. Johnson's interlocutor, that the world, or more particularly the country, owed them a living. In disregard of property-rights, and particularly of the sanctity of public property, there was, perhaps, some unusual laxity in the later career of the Civil War generation; and it is quite arguable that this may have been a result of war conditions, with the waste and plunder of government stores that was so wide-spread, and the pillaging which occasionally marked the advance of armies. Rape had been extremely uncommon, and of other such immoral practices as entailed physical degeneration, the reticence of that mid-Victorian period allowed small evidence to survive. The extent of the advertisements of venereal remedies, however, often running to nearly half the advertising space even in reputable papers, alone shows that the problem existed, while public opinion forbade effective measures for handling it. Nor was the régime of the camps such as to instill any offsetting sanitary habits of life. Bathing and real cleanliness remained matters of personal desire, and of inheritance, though a general feeling for a greater spruceness of appearance than had been characteristic of American men may be traced to

military inspection. Feeding continued to be a matter of abundance, put away in haste, with some modifications through the replacement of individual preparation by ready-to-eat concoctions, whose ingredients were to remain long unsupervised by law.

Certainly army life between 1861 and 1865 had much less relation to normal life than army life of to-day. Special services were few, and the soldierly routine was largely a matter of the manual of arms. It is as yet uncertain how effective the attempts to introduce civilian education into the camps will be, but, with the pervasive scope of modern war, a large proportion of the soldiers of to-day have had to study, have acquired the power of mental concentration, and very often have laid a practical foundation for some craft which may serve them afterwards. The boys of 1861 carried away from the army little except a certain physical responsiveness and a habit of discipline. Yet one by-product of war experience was probably not without national significance. The Civil War armies were large and the administrative problems involved in handling them developed the talent of many of those who were the instruments in transforming the United States in a single generation from a nation with an industrial life relatively very simple, to one well in the van of our modern, complex, economic civilization.

One of the tragedies of the Civil War is that the army that saved the Union retained, or, more correctly, after having been dissolved into the commonwealth for fifteen years, regained its selfconsciousness chiefly through its efforts to secure what it considered an adequate reward for its services. Mild, indeed, and little menacing to the state as was its activity compared with that of many another victorious soldiery, it had an effect undeniably bad on the politics of the eighties and nineties, and it cooled, in the minds of many, the gratitude which should have warmed the last years of the veterans. That the total amount of pensions obtained was greatly in excess of the amount that the country should have paid and could afford to pay, is doubtful, but it was paid at a time when it served merely to smooth the difficulties of old age, instead of fitting for life, and it was so evenly distributed among those who needed and those who did not, that it seldom served as a strong door in cases where there was a real wolf. Much can doubtless be done to prevent a recurrence of such a situation, if the community, without waiting to be urged, adopts a generous plan, based on a broad conception of social obligation. Fundamentally, however, the best hope that the conscious influence of our new veterans may be directed along constructive lines, rests in the difference in the

public aims of the two wars. Those of the Civil War may be expressed in negative terms, that the Union should not be dissolved, and that slavery should be abolished. By 1868, at least, these objects had been attained.

The present war, at it has impressed itself on the American. mind, has more resembled that of the Revolution, where the object was not only separation from Great Britain, but the founding of a new nation. As the veterans of that war found their task one that continued with scarcely abated interest their life long, so the veterans of this war, it may be hoped, will continue to throw their weight, united on the battle-field to overthrow the German imperial system, still united into the task of guarding a new world organization through its critical period.

CARL R. FISH.

DOCUMENTS

Diary and Memoranda of William L. Marcy, 1849–1851

FOR many years the papers of William Learned Marcy were in the possession of his heirs and were not open to historical investigators. Marcy was twice married. His first wife was Dolly Newell of Southbridge, Massachusetts, to whom he was married in September, 1812. She died in Troy, New York, on March 6, 1821, leaving two sons, William G. and Samuel. William L. Marcy's second wife was Cornelia Knower of Albany, whom he married about 1825. Samuel Marcy married Eliza M. Humphreys. Four children were born to them; the second child, Edith, married Charles Stillman Sperry, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, who rose to the rank of rear-admiral.

The Marcy papers were originally collected by Mr. George Newell, a brother of William L. Marcy's first wife, his intention being to write a life of his distinguished brother-in-law. Owing to Mr. Newell's death the project was never carried out. The papers passed into the hands of the Knower family and were preserved by John Knower, a brother of William L. Marcy's second wife. He kept them at his residence near the Manhattan Club in New York City. After John Knower's death, the papers passed into the keeping of his nephew, Benjamin Knower, and were taken by him to Scarborough, New York. After the death of Benjamin Knower, in 1904, the documents were sent to the wife of Rear-Admiral Charles Stillman Sperry and were kept in the vault of the War College at Newport, Rhode Island. They remained there until 1914 when Mrs. Sperry had a wooden chest and a cow-hide trunk which contained the more valuable papers sent to her at Boulder, Colorado, where she now resides with her son, Charles S. Sperry, a professor in the University of Colorado. In 1915 Mrs. Sperry and her son deposited most of these papers, as a loan, in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. For personal reasons they retained three diaries. Through their kindness the Review is allowed to publish the portions of these diaries which have general historical interest.

In addition to the Marcy documents in the Library of Congress and the diaries, Mrs. Sperry has informed me that a trunk contain

ing contemporary newspapers and pamphlets collected by William L. Marcy is on deposit in a warehouse in Brooklyn. Mrs. Sperry also told me that a portrait of her grandfather hung for many years on the walls of the Clarendon Hotel in New York, the property of the proprietor. This she has not seen since 1888, and she is not certain that it is still in existence.

THOMAS MAITLAND MARSHALL.

[In the Marcy Papers in the Library of Congress, volume XVIII., bound at the end of the year 1850, is a memorandum, alluded to by Marcy in the Diary contributed by Professor Marshall, and bearing the title "Washington revisited". Apparently written. in the spring of 1850, it is supplemented by "Further remarks on General Taylor made after his death", intended to be inserted in the memorandum preceding. It has been thought appropriate to add these two compositions to the portion of the Diary here printed.

In volume LXXVII. of the Marcy Papers in the Library of Congress are fragments of diary of the years 1831, 1833, 1835, 1836, 1839, 1843, 1844, 1849-1851, and 1857. Marcy at various. places confesses to not being industrious in the matter of keeping a diary, and the sum total of all this matter, added to what Mrs. Sperry possesses, does not make anything approaching a continuous record, but still remains a series of fragments. Those in the Library of Congress relating to 1857 form something like a continuous record from March 3 to April 18 of that year, but in the main duplicate a series possessed by Mrs. Sperry, which will be presented as a second installment, in our next number. The Library fragments from 1831 to 1851, together with the portions of Mrs. Sperry's series not here extracted, relate almost entirely to personal matters, and are mostly records of Marcy's reading. Marcy was a well-educated man (A.B. Brown University 1809), and his reading was extensive and varied, though desultory. Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton and Hooker, Hudibras and Pope and Dryden, Thomas à Kempis and Thomas Fuller, Montesquieu, and Wordsworth's Prelude and Excursion, figure in the pages of his Diary, with critical comments which, while nowise profound nor deserving of preservation in print, are those of an attentive and appreciative reader. The comments on politics, as will be seen, were mostly written on two occasions, when leisure followed immediately upon release from laborious Cabinet posts, namely, in March, 1849, when Marcy's period of service as Secretary of War in Polk's Cabi

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXIV.-30.