urged an obligatory army which the States
should be required to raise. The Confederate Administration, however,
had defeated his scheme. Since then the situation had changed and had
become so serious that now there was no choice but to submit to military
necessity. He regarded the general conscription law as "absolutely
necessary to save" the Confederacy "from utter devastation if not final
subjugation. Right or wrong, the policy of the Administration had left
us no other alternative...."

The dominant attitude in South Carolina in the autumn of 1862 is in
strong contrast, because of its firm grasp upon fact, with the attitude
of the Brown faction in Georgia. An extended history of the Confederate
movement--one of those vast histories that delight the recluse and scare
away the man of the world--would labor to build up images of what might
be called the personalities of the four States that continued from
the beginning to the end parts of the effective Confederate
system--Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia. We are prone to forget
that the Confederacy was practically divided into separate units as
early as the capture of New Orleans by Farragut, but a great history of
the time would have a special and thrilling story of the conduct of the
detached western unit, the isolated world of Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas--the "Department of the Trans-Mississippi"--cut off from the main
body of the Confederacy and hemmed in between the Federal army and
the deep sea. Another group of States--Tennessee, Mississippi,
Alabama--became so soon, and remained so long, a debatable land, on
which the two armies fought, that they also had scant opportunity for
genuine political life. Florida, small and exposed, was absorbed in its
gallant achievement of furnishing to the armies a number of soldiers
larger than its voting population.

Thus, after the loss of New Orleans, one thing with another operated
to confine the area of full political life to Virginia and her three
neighbors to the South. And yet even among these States there was no
political solidarity or unanimity of opinion, for the differences in
their past experience, social structure, and economic conditions made
for distinct points of view. In South Carolina, particularly, the
prevailing view was that of experienced, disillusioned men who realized
from the start that secession had burnt their bridges, and that now they
must win the fight or change the whole current of thei