species of
disaffection, which began to influence so many, characterized by the
slightest tendency toward treachery or renegadeism. Hundreds of
citizens, who were fiercely opposed to the administration, and cordially
disliked Mr. Davis, who had even lost much of their interest in the
Confederate army and its fortunes, nevertheless hated the Northern
people, the Federal Government, and the invading army, with a hatred
immeasureably more thorough, rabid, and ineradicable, than at the
beginning of the war, ere they knew practically what invasion was like.
With a strange inconsistency, these men would have done any thing to
have injured the enemy, even when averse to making further sacrifices
for the benefit of the Confederacy. So far from renegading and pandering
to Federal rule and success, the large majority of this class would have
pawned their souls for power to crush the Federal arms. This is why the
Southern renegade is regarded by the Southern people with loathing,
scorn, and hatred, burning and inextinguishable. Although destitution
and suffering were not general, at this time, in the South, they had
prevailed, and to a fearful extent, in many sections; and everywhere a
solemn and well-founded apprehension was felt upon the subject. Still it
took two years more of disaster--of an invasion which probed every nook
and corner of the South, and a condition of almost famine, to finally
break the spirit of the Southern people, and make them, in the
abjectness of their agony, actually welcome a peace which heralded
subjugation as a relief from the horrors of war. It was the submission
of the people which took the steel out of the army.

It is the fashion, with a certain class of Southern writers, to denounce
Mr. Davis as the author of this condition of things, and to revile the
Southern people because of their ultimate despair and surrender. Many
and great blunders were committed in the conduct of the civil and
military affairs of the Confederacy, and doubtless Mr. Davis was
responsible for some of them.

In an affair of such magnitude, as was the Southern movement and the
consequent war, errors would have characterized, in all probability, the
administration of the most practiced and skillful military and political
chiefs--how then could the administration of men, unschooled in the
practical arts of managing revolutions and wars, be free from them? The
wonder is, not that blunders were made, but that the bad effect of