s or gather taxes in
kind from farmers who preferred always to pay in "lawful money." The
Confederacy was getting into debt beyond all chance of redemption, and
the States were likewise mortgaged to the utmost limit of their credit
before the end of the year 1864.

But the tax law of 1864 was only one of the burdens under which
Southerners, who had never accustomed themselves to paying taxes in any
large way, groaned. In 1862 General Lee had urged upon Davis a conscript
law which would keep his ranks full. Congress grudgingly enacted the
required legislation, and later more drastic laws were passed; but the
simple people who occupied the remote mountain sections of the South and
the small farmers and tenants of the sandy ridges or piney woods
responded slowly when confronted by the officers of the law. Thousands
positively refused service in the armies and resorted to the dense
forests or swamps, where they were fed by friends and neighbors who
refused to assist the government recruiting agents. In the mountains of
Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee these people were so numerous
that the presence of troops was required to keep up the semblance of
obedience to law. Local warfare was the result in many places. Unionists
who had not been able to join the armies of the United States assisted
those who refused to serve in the Confederate ranks. As time went on
thousands of deserters joined the recalcitrants in the Southern hills,
and during the last year of the war it was a serious problem of State
and Confederate authorities what to do with these people, who now
numbered quite a hundred thousand men.

Resistance to tax-gatherers and to recruiting officers, and the
despondency which followed the disasters of 1863 and the tightening of
the Federal blockade, led to dissatisfaction and even resistance in the
loyal black belts. In North Carolina a peace movement, led by an able
newspaper editor, W. W. Holden, gained the sympathies of Governor Vance,
who had never liked Jefferson Davis nor really sympathized with the
cause of secession. In Virginia the friends of John B. Floyd, who had
been summarily dismissed from the army for his hasty surrender of Fort
Donelson in 1862, aided by the followers of John M. Daniel, editor of
the Richmond _Examiner_, did what they could to embarrass the
Confederate President. The Rhett influence in South Carolina and the
long-standing quarrel of Governor Brown of Georgia with Jefferson Davis