Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/119

 Confederate Diplomacy. 107

cession movement. Mr. Davis was, perhaps, never quite under- stood.

The hand of the Confederate government denied the predicate of preference to the men from whose brains and hearts the Southern movement had been nourished into complete system. In the years of opportunity from foreign diplomacy, the Secretary of State was Judah P. Benjamin, a Whig and Unionist in the period when tariffs and free trade were contending American theories; the Secretary of War was James A. Seddon, by whose order General Johnston was retired from command, the second army in strength then de- stroyed, and Seddon had been earnestly opposed to the formation of the Confederacy long after President Davis took the oath at Montgomery; the Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher G. Mem- minger, was a lifelong and active opponent of the Calhoun doctrine and he was put in office against the declared judgment of the Pres- ident that Robert Toombs, secessionist, was the ablest financier among all American public men. It is not worth while to say these officers were all faithful; they were all failures. The axiom remains unimpeached, that statecraft is the intellectual product of an ideal. Without the ideal there is no statecraft. Statecraft involving the efficiency of the Confederate war office did not suggest John A. Campbell for Assistant Secretary of War, yet Campbell held the place until the end in the face of his avowal to the President that he had no sympathy with the motives of the Confederacy. (Letter of Campbell to Judge Curtis.) The Senator from Georgia, Benja- min H. Hill, was notoriously the friend and counsellor of Mr. Davis, yet within thirty days of the meeting of the Confederate Congress at Montgomery, Mr. Hill had denounced bitterly the Southern movement. There was never a day when he either expected or desired the Confederacy to live. (Life and Speeches of B. H. Hill, by his son.)

RHETT, YANCEY AND WIGFALL.

Neither text-page or index of the five octave volumes prepared by Mr. Davis and his wife, purporting to relate the tale of the rise and fall of the Confederacy and the parts acted by many persons, contains the name of Robert Barnwell Rhett, William L. Yancey, Louis T. Wigfall and their associated secessionists. The massive volumes leave a perfect hiatus between the lucid accounts of the incorporation of the States' rights principle in the Federal system of the United States and the application of the principle in the per-