Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/124

 112 Southern Historical Society Papers.

cretionary power to buy arms and army equipments. The person selected was an old army officer, who had been detailed as drill master and commandant at the University of Alabama, a young man, Captain Caleb Huse, of Massachusetts. Captain Huse was a graduate of West Point, and a good soldier, but citizens and pru- dent soldiers thought General Beauregard, with a competent staff, must have been a more serviceable officer to have sent abroad on so vital a responsibility.

As the sequel proved, when General Joseph E. Johnston, soon after the First Manassas, proposed to invade the North as the necessary strategy of war, President Davis assured him the War Department had not the arms needed. The President said, with apparently deep feeling, that he "had tried to get arms, but had failed, and he did not know when he could get them. So about the same time, when General Albert Sidney Johnston, had recruited and put in camp ten or twelve thousand volunteers for the Western army, the Secretary of War ordered the camps broken np and the men returned home for want of arms. In all that time, and for months after, Capt. Huse was receiving only $250 or about that sum, a month from his Government to use in his duty, but having made known to friends of the Confederacy in London his urgent need, Sir Isaac Campbell loaned him half a million dollars on his private account and his cargo of much needed arms sailed.

The Confederacy needed a currency and manufactured one. Did the abortive effort fairly represent the opportunities of the govern- ment ? There was much of foreign sympathy rejected in the pro- ceeding. We shall see that " cotton " bonds of the Confederacy, marketed in England and France were almost 100 per cent, higher than the bonds of the United States at the same period. I well remember that Vice-President Stephens in conversation remarked to me, in the war time, that the Confederacy with a little more busi- ness tact in the finances, might establish 4< the strongest paper cur- rency in the world," referring to the uses that might be made of credit, founded on cotton, by the Treasury Department.

' ' COTTON OBLIGATIONS. ' '

The Confederate cruiser Alabama, was built for the government at Birkenhead, on the Mersey, by a firm of Laird, a member of Parliament, was a member. The cost was $250,000 and the firm rejected offers from the Secretary of the Navy, at Washington, to