“Fellow-citizens of the Confederate States:
“I rejoice with you, this evening, in those better and happier feelings which we all experience, as compared with the anxiety of three days ago. Your little army—derided for its want of numbers—derided for its want of arms—derided for its lack of all the essential material of war—has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and it now flies, in inglorious retreat, before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia; we have taught them that the grand old mother of Washington still nurtures a band of heroes; and a yet bloodier and far more fatal lesson awaits them, unless they speedily acknowledge that freedom to which you were born.”
[39] The Harper’s Magazine article of General Jordan.
[40] The Federal official reports are overwhelmingly in confirmation of these views of General Jackson. General McClellan stated that “in no quarter were the dispositions for defense such as to offer resistance to a respectable body of the enemy.”
[41] The writer heard this speech of Mr. Davis, and his recollection is positive of the encouragement extended by the President to the hope of an immediate forward movement. The recollection of the author of “The Diary of a Rebel War Clerk” seems to be substantially the same.
[42] One evidence of this “persecution” would appear to consist in the fact that the President, having reluctantly commissioned Generals Lovell and G. W. Smith, upon the recommendations of Generals Beauregard and Johnston, chose also to commission, at the same time, with a similar rank, General Van Dorn, giving the latter a senior commission. Smith and Lovell had but recently come to the South, both being residents of New York, before the war, while Van Dorn had promptly sought service in the Confederate army before hostilities commenced, had done excellent service, and been constantly in front of the enemy. Another proof of “persecution” is that the President refused to permit such an organization of the army as he believed to be in conflict with the laws of Congress.
The commonly assigned origin of the difference between President Davis and General Beauregard, which gave rise to so much scandal and falsehood during the war, was the suppression of the preliminary portion of General B.’s report of the battle of Manassas. The correct version of that matter is now well known. President Davis did not suppress any portion of Beauregard’s report. He did object to certain preliminary statements of the report, and requested that they should be altered or omitted. When this was declined, the President sent the report to Congress, accompanied by an indorsement of his own, correcting what he conceived to be errors. General Beauregard’s friends in Congress, unwilling that these comments of the President should be published, suppressed both the objectionable passages and the executive indorsement. So that they, and not the President, occasioned that “suppression,” from which arose much gossip and mystery. A sufficient answer to these charges of personal antagonism by the President to these two officers, should be the fact that he retained them in command of the two largest armies of the Confederacy, until relinquished by them, in the one case, because of sickness, and in the other, in consequence of a wound which caused disability.
[43] The friends of Mr. Mallory, in illustration of this unreasoning prejudice, were accustomed to declare that, “were a Confederate vessel to sink in a storm, in the middle of the ocean, the Richmond Examiner and Mr. Foote would advocate the censure of the Secretary of the Navy, as responsible for her loss.”
[44] The careful reader will hardly have overlooked the passage, in the Message to Congress, in the preceding chapter, in which Mr. Davis thus alludes to this subject: “The active state of military preparation among the nations of Europe, in April last, the date when our agents first went abroad, interposed unavoidable delays in the procurement of arms, and the want of a navy has greatly impeded our efforts to obtain military supplies of all sorts.”
A few months later, he said, speaking with characteristic candor: “I was among those who, from the beginning, predicted war as the consequences of secession, although I must admit that the contest has assumed proportions more gigantic than I had anticipated. I predicted war, not because our right to secede and to form a government of our own was not indisputable and clearly defined in the spirit of that declaration, which rests the right to govern on the consent of the governed, but saw that the wickedness of the North would precipitate a war upon us.”—Address before Mississippi Legislature, December, 1862.