Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/486

448 done ashore and part afloat. A few vessels had been constructed and equipped both at home and abroad. Ordnance and ordnance stores had been manufactured, coal and iron mines had been developed, and workshops established.

Mr. Miles, of South Carolina, introduced a variety of bills designed to extend the application of the conscription law to all citizens under forty-five years of age; to retaliate where partisan rangers captured by the enemy were not treated as prisoners of war, to enforce the laws on felonies against any soldier of the United States army committing felony by delivering the offender if captured to the civil courts for trial; to prevent the arming of negroes; to retaliate for the seizure of private citizens of the Confederate States by the enemy; to put an export duty of twenty per cent on cotton and tobacco as a fund to indemnify losses of citizens by the acts of the enemy. These bills show the nature of the legislation suggested by the events then passing rapidly into history. They were referred to committees, discussed and determined according to the judgment of Congress as hereinafter stated.

The increase in the army being the subject of discussion, the conscription law and its workings were discussed at length with considerable spirit. Mr. Foote called attention to the doubts of its constitutionality existing at the time of the passage of that measure, and expressed his opinion that if the expedient should be allowed to be established as a permanent system, the result would be the subversion of State sovereignty and popular freedom. The necessity under which the act was passed had grown out of neglect by the provisional government to legislate at the beginning of war so as to provide for deficiency in the army, and he alleged that no such necessity now existed because the States stood ready to respond to all requisitions. Collision with State authorities would certainly occur if the new law asked for by the war secretary