alarm
which their strategic importance might well have created. But when in
the latter days of July the facts became generally known, the Mercury
arraigned the President's conduct of the war as "a vast complication of
incompetence and folly"; it condemned the whole scheme of the Northern
invasion and maintained that Lee should have stood on the defensive
while twenty or thirty thousand men were sent to the relief of
Vicksburg. These two ideas it bitterly reiterated and in August went
so far as to quote Macaulay's famous passage on Parliament's dread of a
decisive victory over Charles and to apply it to Davis in unrestrained
language that reminds one of Pollard.

Equally unrestrained were the attacks upon other items of the policy of
the Confederate Government. The Impressment Law began to be a target.
Farmers who were compelled to accept the prices fixed by the impressment
commissioners cried out that they were being ruined. Men of the stamp of
Toombs came to their assistance with railing accusations such as
this: "I have heard it said that we should not sacrifice liberty
to independence, but I tell you, my countrymen, that the two
are inseparable.... If we lose our liberty we shall lose our
independence.... I would rather see the whole country the cemetery of
freedom than the habitation of slaves." Protests which poured in upon
the Government insisted that the power to impress supplies did not carry
with it the power to fix prices. Worthy men, ridden by the traditional
ideas of political science and unable to modify these in the light of
the present emergency, wailed out their despair over the "usurpation" of
Richmond.

The tax in kind was denounced in the same vein. The licensing provisions
of this law and its income tax did not satisfy the popular imagination.
These provisions concerned the classes that could borrow. The classes
that could not borrow, that had no resources but their crops, felt that
they were being driven to the wall. The bitter saying went around that
it was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." As land and slaves
were not directly taxed, the popular discontent appeared to have ground
for its anger. Furthermore, it must never be forgotten that this was the
first general tax that the poor people of the South were ever conscious
of paying. To people who knew the tax-gatherer as little more than a
mythical being, he suddenly appeared like a malevolent creature who
swept off ruthlessly the tenth