inistration. Almost every
disaster, every fault of its management was traceable more or less
directly to Davis. Kentucky had been occupied by the Federal army
because of the "dull expectation" in which the Confederate Government
had stood aside waiting for things somehow to right themselves. The
Southern Congress had been criminally slow in coming to conscription,
contenting itself with an army of 400,000 men that existed "on paper."
"The most distressing abuses were visible in the ill-regulated hygiene
of our camps." According to this book, the Confederate Administration
was solely to blame for the loss of Roanoke Island. In calling that
disaster "deeply humiliating," as he did in a message to Congress,
Davis was trying to shield his favorite Benjamin at the cost of gallant
soldiers who had been sacrificed through his incapacity. Davis's
promotion of Benjamin to the State Department was an act of "ungracious
and reckless defiance of popular sentiment." The President 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." The generals "fretted
under this pragmatism" of one whose "vanity" directed the war "from his
cushioned seat in Richmond" by means of the one formula, "the defensive
policy."

One of Pollard's chief accusations against the Confederate Government
was its failure to enforce the conscription law. His paper, the
Examiner, as well as the Mercury, supported Davis in the policy of
conscription, but both did their best, first, to rob him of the
credit for it and, secondly, to make his conduct of the policy appear
inefficient. Pollard claimed for the Examiner the credit of having
originated the policy of conscription; the Mercury claimed it for Rhett.

In other words, an aggressive war party led by the Examiner and the
Mercury had been formed in those early days when the Confederate
Government appeared to be standing wholly on the defensive, and when it
had failed to confide to the people the extenuating circumstance that
lack of arms compelled it to stand still whether it would or no. And
yet, after this Government had changed its policy and had taken up in
th