to entertain them on the piano, cursed and abused them, stripped them of their jewelry and clothing, and offered them indignities which it would offend delicacy to describe.

The fiat seemed to have gone forth for stern and terrible work on the North Carolina frontier, in this dark and melancholy country of swamps, overrun with negro banditti, and now the especial theatre of the war's vengeance. The country was a rich one, comparing favorably with the Mississippi bottoms, and one of the most important sources of meat supplies which was at this time accessible to our armies. To protect this country as far as possible, forces were raised, under authority of the Government of North Carolina, for local defence and to repel invasion; they were duly organized, and their officers were commissioned by the governor, and for a year or more had been in the regular service of the State. The Yankees found it convenient to designate these forces as "guerillas," in order to justify the fiendish warfare of negro partisans and white banditti, who were invited to prey upon the population.

In December, a force of negroes, under the command of Brigadier-general Wild, who emulated the brutal disposition and ferocious cowardice of his master, "Beast" Butler, invaded the north-eastern parts of North Carolina. In the county of Pasquotank, forty miles from Norfolk, he hung Daniel Bright at his own house. He seized more than one hundred thousand dollars' worth of personal property in the adjoining counties; stripped the farmers of every living thing, and brought it all away, leaving hundreds of inhabitants without a pound of meat or a peck of meal.

Daniel Bright was a member of the Sixty-second Georgia regiment, under command of Colonel J. R. Griffin, and had received authority from the Governor of North Carolina to raise a company in the county for local defence. Failing in the effort, he had retired to his farm, and was there seized, carried off and executed. He was hung on the side of the public road, and a placard fastened upon his back.

But the most brutal of all the outrages of Wild was the seizure, as "hostages" for two of his negroes who had been captured, of two most respectable married ladies, Mrs. Phoebe Munden, wife of Lieutenant W. J. Munden, and Mrs. Elizabeth

Weeks, wife of Private Pender Weeks, of Captain John T. Elliot's company. The first was arrested at her own house, in the presence only of her three children, of whom the oldest was ten years of age, conveyed a few miles to Elizabeth City, confined in a room without fire, bed or bedding, with several male prisoners, and tied by the feet and hands. A negro guard was placed in charge of the prisoners. The succeeding day, the other lady, Mrs. Weeks, was placed in the same room. They were constantly guarded, and neither was allowed to leave the room for the most necessary duty, but in company with an armed negro soldier. Mrs. Munden was in delicate health, and forced from a home immediately laid in ashes, with all it contained, without other apparel than she wore upon her person, and passed several nights in the cheerless and cold apartment to which she was confined at that inclement season, before the humanity of her captors was so far softened as to permit blankets to be furnished for her use. They were kept some days and then removed to Norfolk. When Mrs. Munden was carried off, her wrists were bleeding with the stricture of the cord with which she was bound, and it is said that a negro was allowed by Wild to hold the cord that bound her, and thus drive her into Norfolk.

Such were the scenes which illustrated the Yankee idea of prosecuting the war with "vigor," and gratified the vile and cowardly revenge of those who, in luxurious cities and comfortable homes, clamored for the blood of "rebels," and even claimed women and children as their victims.

CHAPTER VIII.

The President's Declaration to the Confederate Congress of 1863-64.-"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. -"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. The reverse of the proposition need not be repeated here.

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.