Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/549

Rh ident be required to adopt measures to suspend hostilities for a limited time, and to provide for a general convention through which the differences may be settled and the Union restored, but objection was made and the resolution was not proposed. Mr. Le Blond, of Ohio, two weeks later offered an amendment to the enrollment bill then pending in the U. S. Congress that compulsory enrollment be suspended till such time as the President shall have made a request for an armistice and shall have made such efforts as are consistent with honor to restore harmony among the States by the appointment of commissioners empowered to negotiate for peace upon the terms of a restoration of the Union under the Constitution and until such offer shall have been rejected by the so-called Confederate government. This reasonable and patriotic resolution received only thirteen votes. Ninety-one votes were recorded against even a suspension of the draft preliminary to the offer of an armistice and the appointment of commissioners.

There were undoubtedly very powerful peace currents, genial as the gulf stream, setting in at this date from many sources upon the great throbbing bosom of the American people. They are all perceptible now by every one who reads the signs of those times. Those officials to whom the great interests of the South had been committed spoke of peace with due caution, sometimes uttering defiance and high resolve to maintain the Confederate cause at every cost, and yet it must be remembered that disunion for its own sake was never the &quot; cause of the South.&quot; A Confederate senator from Georgia, one who was the right hand supporter of Mr. Davis, said in public speech to his people at home that slavery should be surrendered before constitutional rights were abandoned. All the declarations of eternal fealty to the Confederacy made in 1864 must be read and understood as expressions conditional upon the persistent maintenance by the administration at Washington of the