priority and the miners did what they pleased. They created the towns of Lewiston, Boise on the
Salmon River, and in 1864 Helena. Idaho was a mining-created state; so was Montana, formed
out of its eastern part, and Wyoming Territory. Nor was gold and silver the only lure-it was at
Butte, Montana, that one of the world's great copper strikes was made. The miners were almost
entirely young men between sixteen and thirty; the women nearly all whores. But it was creative:
seven states, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana owe
their origins to mining-and the key formation period, in most cases, was during the Civil War.
It was totally different in the South: there, nothing mattered, nothing could occur, but the war.
Concern for the war, anxiety to win the war, was so intense that people forgot what it was really
about. Davis himself forgot to the point where he was among the earliest to urge that slaves
should be manumitted in return for fighting for the South. Resistance to this idea was, at first,
overwhelming, on the ground that blacks would not or could not fight-this despite the fact that
180,000 blacks from the North were enlisted in the Union army and many of them fought very
well indeed. Arguing with a senator who was against enlisting blacks at any price, Davis in
exasperation declared: If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, "Died of a theory." As the Union army sliced off chunks of the South and liberated its slaves, many flocked to join the army-apart from anything else, it was the only way they could earn a living. Slavery itself was breaking down, even in those parts of the South not yet under Union rule. Slaves were walking off the plantations more or less as they chose; there was no one to prevent them, and no one to hunt them once they were at liberty. There was no work and no food for them either. So they were tempted to cross the lines and enlist in the Union forces. Hence Davis redoubled his efforts to persuade the Confederate Congress to permit their enlistment. As he put it,We are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us, or against us.'
Eventually on March 13, 1865, Congress accepted his arguments, but even then it left
emancipation to follow enlistment only with the consent of the owner. Davis, in promulgating
the new law, added a proviso of his own making it compulsory for the owner of a slave taken
into war service to provide manumission papers. But by then it was all too late anyway. Granted
the fact that slaves formed more than a third of the South's population at the beginning of the
Civil War, their prompt conscription would have enormously added to the strength of the
Confederate armies. And most of them would have been willing to fight for the South, too-after
all, it was their way of life as well as that of the whites which was at stake. It is a curious
paradox, but one typical of the ironies of history, that black participation might conceivably have
turned the scales in the South's favor. But obstinacy and `theory' won the day and few blacks
actually got the chance to fight for their homeland.
The end of the Confederacy was pitiful. On April 1, 1865, Davis sent his wife Varina away from
Richmond, giving her a small Colt and fifty rounds of ammunition. The next day he had to get
out of Richmond himself. He went to Danville, to plan guerrilla warfare. By this point General
Lee was already in communication with General Grant about a possible armistice, and had
indeed privately used the word `surrender,' but he continued to fight fiercely with his army, using
it with his customary skills. He dismissed pressure from junior officers to negotiate, and as late
as April 8 he took severe disciplinary action against three general officers who, in his opinion,
were not fighting in earnest or had deserted their posts. But by the next morning Lee's army was
virtually surrounded. He dressed in his best uniform, wearing, unusually for him, a red silk sash
and sword. Having heard the latest news of the position of his troops, and the Union forces, he