CHAPTER VIII.

66

The President's Declaration to the Confederate Congress of 1868-64.-"Want of Capacity" in the Confederate Authorities.-Character of Jefferson Davis.-Official Shiftlessness at Richmond.-Early Prognostications of the War.-The "Statesmanship" of the Confederates.-Ludicrous Errors of Confederate Leaders.-What "King Cotton" might have done.-Gross Mismanagement of the Confederate Finances.-Mr. Memminger's Maladministration.-The Moral Evils of an Expanded Currency.-The Military Situation in December.-Secretary Seddon's Shameful Confession.—“Demagogueism" in the Confederate War Department.-Seddon's Propositions.-Military "Substitutes."-An Act of Perfidy.-Bullying in Congress.-Spirit of the Confederate Soldiery.-LINCOLN'S "PEACE PROCLAMATION."-Its Stupidity, Insolence, and Outrage. How the Confederates Replied to it.-A New Appeal Against Reconstruction."-THE SLAVERY QUESTION IN THE WAR.-A French Opinion.--The Abolitionists Unmasked.-Decay of European Sympathy with Them.-Review of Lincoln's "Emancipation" Policy.--The Arming of the Blacks.-The Negro Colonization Schemes.-Experiments of New England "Civilization" in Louisiana.-Frightful Mortality of "Freedmen."-The Appalling Statistics of Emancipation.— The Contraband Camps in the Mississippi Valley.-Pictures of Yankee Philanthropy. 17 "Slavery" Tested by the War.-The Confederates the True Friends of the African Laborer. The System of Negro Servitude in the Confederacy.-The "War-to-theKnife" Party in the North.-HISTORY OF THE "RETALIATION" POLICY.-The Outrages of Yankee Warfare.-President Davis's Sentimentalism.-The Record of his Unpardonable and Unparalleled Weakness.-A Peep into Yankee Prisons.-The TortureHouses of the North.-Captain Morgan's Experience Among "the Convict-Drivers." -President Davis's Bluster.-His Two Faces.-Moral Effects of Submission to Yankee Outrage. The Rival Administrations in December 1868.-Richmond and Washington. Mr. Lincoln's Gaiety.-New Issues for the Confederacy.

At the meeting of the Confederate Congress, in December, 1863, President Davis said: "We now know that the only reliable hope for peace is in the vigor of our resistance, while the cessation of their [the enemy's] hostility is only to be expected from the pressure of their necessities." The Confederate Administration had at last arrived at the correct comprehension of the war.

But it had reached this conclusion only after a period of nearly three years of ignorance, short-sighted conceit and perversity.

The careful and candid reader of the pages of two volumes of the history of the war, by this writer, will bear him witness that at no time has he reflected upon the patriotism or the public integrity of President Davis. The accusation, which

has run through these volumes, is simply this: want of capacity in the administration of public affairs.

It is not possible that any historian of this war can overlook certain admirable qualities of the President of the Confederacy: his literary abilities, his spruce English, his ascetic morals, the purity of his private life, and the extraordinary facility of his manners. But he was not a statesman; he had no administrative capacities; he lacked that indispensable and practical element of success in all political administrations-knowledge of the true value of men; and he was-probably, unconsciously through his vanity-accessible to favorites. In the old government, Mr. Davis had never been accounted as a statesman, but was quite as obtuse as most of the public men of that day. He it was, of Southern politicians, who declared in a public letter, in 1858, that the "Kansas Conference bill" was "the triumph of all for which we contended." He had failed to see the origin and occasion of the revolution which he assumed to conduct.

His choice of favorites in the field had been as unapt as his selection of political advisers in the Cabinet. This President, who depreciated Price as a militiaman, and held (or probably affected) a light opinion of Beauregard, was convinced that Pemberton was a genius who should be raised by a single stroke of patronage from the obscurity of a major to the position of a Lieutenant-general; recognized Heth as a young Napoleon; selected Lovell as the natural guardian of the Mississippi; declared that Holmes, who had let the enemy slip out of his fingers at Richmond, was the appointed deliverer of Missouri and Arkansas, and competent to take charge of the destinies of an empire; and prophesied with peculiar emphasis of mystery, but a few weeks before the session of Congress, in a public speech in a Southern city, that Bragg by that time. would be in the heart of Tennessee, and on the pinnacles of victory!

The civil administration of Mr. Davis had fallen to a low ebb. There are certain minds which cannot see how want of capacity in our government, official shiftlessness and the mismanagement of public affairs yet consist with the undeniable facts of the successes of our arms and the great achievements of the Confederacy. But it is possible that these two conditions"

may consist--that, in a revolution, the valor and determination of a people may make considerable amends for the faults of its governors. If the history of this war has proved one proposition clearly it is this: that in all its subjects of congratulation, the "statesmanship" of Richmond has little part or lot. Let those who deny the justice of this historical judgment, which refuses to attribute to the official authorities of this government such success as we have had in this war, say what they have contributed to it.

The evidences of the "statesmanship" of Richmond were not to be found in our foreign relations: these were absurdities. They were not to be found in our provisions for the war: these were make-shifts from month to month. They were not to be found in our financial calculations: these had proved the most ridiculous failures in the monetary annals of the world. We owe this melancholy confession to history, that we do not know of any real and substantial particulars in which the administration of Mr. Davis has contributed to this war. reverse of the proposition need not be repeated here.

The

It is mortifying, indeed, to look back upon the currents of our history, to observe the blindness and littleness of mind, the conceit, the perversity, the short-sighted management on all which we have drifted into this present vastness of war and depths of distress. In Montgomery, at the period of the provisional inauguration of the Confederacy, any one who had the hardihood to insist upon the probability of a war, became a butt of raillery or the object of suspicion. The war once begun, the next idea in the minds of the Confederate leaders was, that it was to be despatched in a few months by mere makeshifts of armies and money, and with the scant supply of munitions already on hand. Months intervened between Lincoln's declaration of war and the actual establishment of the blockade. But no use was made of this golden opportunity, and our importations of army supplies from Europe during all these months, actually may be counted in a few thousand stand of small arms. Secretary Mallory laughed off contractors in New Orleans, who offered to sell to the government a large amount of navy supplies. Judah P. Benjamin, at the head of the War Department, wrote to a friend in the first winter of the war, that within sixty days the country would be at peace.

Later still, in the winter of 1862, President Davis, in a speech before the Legislature of Mississippi, had pronounced the solemn opinion that the war would soon come to an end. Yet we find the same eminent personage now declaring to the Congress of 1863, his belief in an indefinite prolongation of the war, and his despair of his many brilliant former prospects of peace, through instrumentalities other than that of our arms.

Able and candid journals of the North, have repeatedly confessed that they were puzzled by the extraordinary want of foresight and judgment displayed by the Confederate leaders, in their calculation at different periods of the war of the course likely to be pursued by Europe and the North. These errors might have been expected from men of little education, to whom self-interest in its lowest sense was the key to all political problems, but by no means from persons who had studied politics in books. "The notion," said the New York Times, "that the North, being a commercial community, devoted to the pursuit of gain, was, for that reason, sure not to fight, was rather the conclusion of a backwoodsman than of a student. The lesson of history is that commercial communities are among the most pugnacious and ambitious and most obstinate of belligerents: witness Carthage, Venice, Genoa, Holland, and England."

The utter failure of the calculations of the Confederate Administration, regarding France and England, had exhibited a hasty and passionate reasoning, of which Mr. Davis and his associates might well be ashamed. The idea is ludicrous now that at the very beginning of the American revolution, France and England, with their centuries of vast and varied experience, in peace and war, would fling themselves into a convulsion which their great politicians easily saw was the most tremendous one of modern times. Yet this idea was entertained by President Davis; and as proof of it, the Confederate commissioners were instructed to apply to Earl Russell for recognition in England after the first battle of Manassas !

At the commencement of the war, cotton was pronounced "King;" and the absurd and puerile idea was put forward by the politicians of the Davis school, that the great and illustrious power of England would submit to the ineffable humiliation of acknowledging its dependency on the infant Confed

eracy of the South, and the subserviency of its empire, its political interests, and its pride, to a single article of trade that was grown in America! And what indeed is the sum of advantages which the Confederacy drew from the royal resources of cotton? It is true that these resources could not compel the political interests and pride of England. But, properly used, they might have accomplished much for the interests of the Confederacy. In point of fact they accomplished nothing. For one year after the war commenced, the blockade was so slight that the whole of the cotton might have been shipped to Europe, and there sold at two shillings sterling a pound, giving the government, purchasing at twenty cents, a clear profit of six hundred millions of dollars! We may even suppose one-fifth of this captured by the enemy, and we would still have had a balance in our favor, which would have enabled us to have drained every bank in Europe of its specie! Or if we had drawn for this sum as we needed it, our treasury notes would have been equal to gold, and confidence in our currency would have been unshaken and universal.

The Confederacy had thus the element at ready hand for the structure of one of the most successful schemes of finance in the world. But the government was too grossly ignorant to see it. The purchase of the cotton to the government was decried by Mr. Memminger, as a scheme of "soup-house legislation ;" and the new government was started without a basis of credit; without a system of revenue; on the monstrous delusion that money might be manufactured at will out of paper, and that a naked "promise to pay," was all sufficient for the wants of the war!

It is to be frankly admitted that the South commenced the war with financial advantages which the North did not havethat is, without reference to commercial incidents of the blockade, but with respect to the sustention of its credit at home. The South had the cotton and the tobacco. It had the unbounded sympathies of its people. It had larger taxable values per capita than any other country in the world. It is not possible that with these advantages it could have wrecked its credit with its own people, unless through a great want of capacity in the administration of the government. It is not possible, that, with these advantages, its currency should have