Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/565

Rh was passed allowing further time to persons within the enemy s lines to fund their treasury notes, which the President failed to approve. A new tax act was passed levying an additional one- tenth tax required by former acts to be paid in kind and confirming the impressment laws. Supplies necessary for the support of the producer and his family, and to carry on his ordinary business were exempted. The secretary of war was given the discretion to collect or not to collect the additional one-tenth in particular localities, and also the privilege of selling the products received under the act, to State officers for the use of the families of soldiers. Impressment of supplies was authorized to be made only by officers and agents appointed for the purpose. The Confederate Congress then adjourned, June 15th, to meet again in the following November.

The period so auspicious for truce and peace passed on into the meeting of the National Democratic party in Chicago, August 31, 1864, to formulate a platform and put out opposition candidates pledged to invite the Southern States to resume their former relations as far as the new conditions created by the war would permit. The time for the assembling of this convention had been first fixed for the Fourth of July but was wisely postponed in view of the pending efforts to secure peace. It now assembled after these efforts had failed and while new and gigantic measures were in progress to carry on the war. The general, central principle which this assembly seems to have desired to put in issue at the ballot box, was that the Southern States should have the option of reconstruction and resumption of their places in the Union on the old constitutional basis, or on refusing that they should be subjugated by war. The other side was already before the country upon the proposition that the South must first unconditionally surrender, must be subjugated and then reconstructed. Both parties