Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

The Confederate President offered but little of counsel or encouragement to his distressed countrymen. He declared that the magnified proportions of the war had occasioned serious disasters, and that the effort was impossible to protect the whole of the territory of the Confederate States, sea-board and inland. To the popular complaint of inefficiency in the departments of the Government, he replied that they had done all which human power and foresight enabled them to accomplish. He lifted up, in conclusion, a piteous, beautiful, appropriate prayer for the favour of Divine providence.

But it is not to be supposed that the people of the Confederacy, although so little cheered or sustained by their rulers, despaired of the war. There were causes, which were rekindling the fiercest flames of war apart from official inspiration at Richmond. The successes of the enemy had but made him more hateful, and strengthened the South in the determination to have done with him forever. They found new causes of animosity; the war had been brought home to their bosoms; they had obtained practical lessons of the enemy's atrocity and his insolent design; and they came to the aid of their Government with new power and a generosity that was quite willing to forget all its short-comings in the past.

One great cause of animated resolution on the part of the Confederate States was the development at Washington of the design upon slavery, now advanced to a point where there could no longer be a doubt of the revengeful and radical nature of the war. The steps by which the Federal Government had reached this point were in a crooked path, and attended by marks of perfidy. It had indeed given to the world on this subject an astounding record of bad faith, calculated to overwhelm the moral sense of the reader as he compares its different parts and approaches its grand conclusion of self-contradiction the most defiant, and deception the most shameless.

Never had there been such an emphatic protest of a political design as that given by Mr. Lincoln on taking the reins of government, declaring that there was no possible intention, no imaginable occasion, no actual desire to interfere with the subject of negro slavery in the States. Mr. Seward, who had been constituted Secretary of State, and who had been Mr. Lincoln's mouth-piece in Congress before the inauguration, had declared there: “Experience in public affairs has confirmed my opinion that domestic slavery existing in any State is wisely left by the Constitution of the United States, exclusively to the care, management, and disposition of that State; and if it were in my power I would not alter the Constitution in that respect.” Words could scarcely be more distinct and emphatic; but Mr. Lincoln, in his inauguration address, had seen fit to add to them,