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past losses from the blockade, in the cheap prices expected from the excessive supply of two years' crops of cotton in the South. The South was not to be the only or chief loser in the diminished production of her great staple and the forced change in her industrial pursuits. For every laborer who was diverted from the culture of cotton in the South, perhaps, four times as many elsewhere, who had found subsistence in the various employments growing out of its use, would be forced also out of their usual occupations. The prospect of thus bringing ruin upon the industrial interests of other countries was not pleasing to our people or our government; although it was some consolation to know that England, especially, might yet feel, through this change of production in the South, the consequences of her folly and the merited fruits of her injustice to a people who had been anxious for her amity, and had at one time been ready to yield to her important commercial privileges.

In the growing successes of the Northern armies, the spirit of the Southern people came, to the aid of their government with new power, and a generosity that was quite willing to forget all its shortcomings in the past. The public sentiment had been exasperated and determined in its resolution of resistance to the last extremity by the evidences of ruin, barbarism, and shameless atrocities that had marked the paths of the progress of the enemy. The newspapers were filled with accounts of outrages of the enemy in the districts occupied by him. By his barbarous law of confiscation, widows and orphans had been stripped of death's legacies; he had overthrown municipalities and State governments; he had imprisoned citizens without warrant, and regardless of age or sex; he had destroyed commerce, and beggared the mechanic and manufacturer; he had ripped open the knapsacks of our captured soldiery, robbing them of clothing, money, necessaries of life, and even of the instruments of their surgeons. The Southern people considered that they were opposing an enemy who had proved himself a foe to mankind, religion, and civilization.

The venomous spirit of Abolition had been free to develop itself in the growing successes of the Northern arms. It is a curious commentary on the faith of the people of the North, or rather a striking exposure of the subserviency of all the ex

pressions of opinion on the part of that people to considerations of expediency, that, in the beginning of hostilities, even after the proclamation of war by President Lincoln, when it was yet thought important to affect moderation, fugitive slaves from Virginia were captured in the streets of Washington, and, by the direct authority of the Northern government, returned to their masters! A few months later, negro slaves were kidnapped from their masters by the Federal army, under the puerile and nonsensical pretence of their being "contraband of war." The anti-slavery purposes of the war rapidly developed from that point. The Northern journals declared that the excision of slavery was one of the important objects of the war; that the opportunity was to be taken in the prosecution of hostilities to crush out what had been the main cause of difference, and thus to assure the fruit of a permanent peace. In his message to the Federal Congress in December, Mr. Lincoln had hinted that "all indispensable means" must be employed to preserve the Union. An order was published by the War Department making it the occasion of a court-martial for any army officer to return any negro slave within his lines to his master. It was followed by the explanation of Mr. Lincoln's former hint. In an executive message to the Federal Congress, the policy of "the gradual abolishment of slavery," with the pretence of "pecuniary aid" to States adopting such policy, was advised; it was approved in the House of Representatives, by a vote of 88 to 31; and about the same time a bill was introduced into the Senate for the forcible emancipation of the negro slaves in the District of Columbia, which was subsequently passed.

These bitter exhibitions of the North had envenomed the war; its sanguinary tides rose higher; its battle-fields emu lated in carnage the most desperate in modern history; flags of truce were but seldom used, and the amenities of intercourse between belligerents were often slighted by rude messages of defiance. Battles had become frequent and really bloody. But they were no longer decisive of a nation's fate. The campaign covered the whole of a huge territory, and could only be de cided by complicated movements, involving great expenditure of troops and time.

The Southern people, however, were again aroused, and

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nothing was wanting but wisdom, energy, and capacity in the part of the government to have inaugurated another series of brilliant achievements, such as those which rendered illustrious the first months of the war. The rush of men to the battlefield, which was now witnessed in every part of the South, was beyond all former example; and if the government had met this mighty movement of the people with a corresponding amplitude of provision and organization, the cause of the South might have been reckoned safe beyond peradventure.

Unfortunately, however, President Davis was not the man to consult the sentiment and wisdom of the people; he desired to signalize the infallibility of his own intellect in every measure of the revolution, and to identify, from motives of vanity, his own personal genius with every event and detail of the remarkable period of history in which he had been called upon to act. This imperious conceit seemed to swallow up every other idea in his mind. By what was scarcely more than a constitutional fiction, the President of the Confederate States was the head of the army; but Mr. Davis, while he made himself the supreme master of the civil administration of the government, so far as to take the smallest details within his control, and to reduce his cabinet officers to the condition of head clerks, insisted also upon being the autocrat of the army, controlling the plans of every general in the field, and dictating to him the precise limits of every movement that was undertaken. Many of our generals fretted under this pragmatism of an executive, who, instead of attending to the civil affairs of the government and correcting the monstrous abuses that were daily pointed out by the newspapers in the conduct of the departments, was unfortunately possessed with the vanity that he was a great military genius, and that it was necessary for him to dictate, from his cushioned seat in Richmond, the details of every campaign, and to conform every movement in the field to the invariable formula of "the defensive policy."*

The following extract of terse criticism on offensive and defensive warfare is taken from a small work written by one of Napoleon's generals in 1815, and revised in 1855. The writer could not have written with more aptitude to the existing contest, if the errors and unfortunate demonstrations of President Davis's defensive policy had been before his eyes: "The offensive is the proper character which it is essential to give to every war; it exalts the courage of

In a revolutionary leader, something more is wanted than scholarly and polished intellect. The history of the world shows that, in such circumstances, the plainest men, in point o learning and scholarship, have been the most successful, and that their elements of success have been quick apprehension, practical judgment, knowledge of human nature, and, above all, a disposition to consult the aggregate wisdom of the people, and to increase their stores of judgment, by deigning to learn from every possible source of practical wisdom within their reach.

President Davis was not a man to consult, even in the smallest matter of detail, the wisdom of others, or to relax his purposes or personal preferences, at the instance of any consideration that might compromise him in respect of conceit or punctilio. About nothing connected with the new government had the popular will been so clearly and emphatically expressed, as the necessity of a reorganization of the Cabinet. Nobody expected those offices to be permanently filled by the provisional appointees. They were put there under an emergency; in some instances simply as compliments to certain States, and without the slightest expectation that they would be imposed on the country for seven long years. Had the Union continued, and Mr. Davis been elected to the Presidency, the selection of such a Cabinet of intellectual pigmies from the nation at large would have astounded the public. The two great branches of the administration-the War and the Navy Departmentswere in the hands of men who had neither the respect, nor the confidence of the public. Mr. Benjamin, the Secretary of War, had been seriously injured, by a number of doubtful official acts, in the public estimation, which never held him higher

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the soldier; it disconcerts the adversary, strips from him the initiative, and diminishes his means. Do not wait for the enemy in your own fireplaces, go always to seek him in his own home, when you will find opportunity at the same time to live at his expense, and to strip from him his resources. In penetrating his territory, commence by acting en masse with all forces, and be sure that the first advantages are yours. * * * Never adopt the defensive, unless it is impossible for you to do otherwise. If you are reduced to this sad extremity, let it be in order to gain time, to wait for your reinforcements, drill your soldiers, strengthen your alliances, draw the enemy upon bad ground, lengthen the base of his operations; and let an ulterior design to take the offensive be without ceasing the end of all your actions.”

than a smart, expeditious, and affable official. Mr. Mallory, the Secretary of the Navy, had, in the old government, in which he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, been the butt of every naval officer in the country for his ignorance, his sang-froid, his slow and blundering manner, and the engrossment of his mind by provisions to provide gratifications for his social habits.

President Davis refused to concede any thing to public sentiment with reference to the reorganization of his cabinet; although it is to be remarked that the demand for change was made not by a popular clamor, which a wise ruler would have done right to disregard and to contemn, but by that quiet, conservative, and educated sentiment which no magistrate in a republican government had the right to disregard. Mr. Mallory was retained at the head of the navy; Mr. Benjamin was promoted to the Secretaryship of the State, and the only material change in the cabinet was the introduction as Secretary of War of General Randolph, of Virginia, a gentleman whose sterling personal worth made him acceptable to all parties, and promised at least some change for the better in the administration of a government that had been eaten up by servility, and had illustrated nothing more than the imperious conceit of a single

man.

The Confederate Congress had passed a bill to create the office of commanding general, who should take charge of the military movements of the war. The bill was vetoed by President Davis; but, at the same time, the unsubstantial show of compliance which had been made with reference to the Cabinet was repeated with reference to the commanding general, and Mr. Davis appointed Gen. Lee to the nominal office of conmanding general, the order, however, which nominated him providing that he should "act under the direction of the president." Thus it was that Mr. Davis kept in his hands the practical control of every military movement on the theatre of the war; and it was very curious, indeed, that the servile newspapers, which applanded in him this single and imperious control of the conduct of the war, were unmindful of the plain and consistent justice of putting on his shoulders that exclusive responsibility for disasters which is inseparable from the honors of practical autocracy.

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