r deserters from Tennessee, and
terrorized the countryside. Governor Vance, alarmed at the progress
which this disorder was making, issued a proclamation imploring his
rebellious countrymen to conduct in a peaceable manner their campaign
for the repeal of obnoxious laws.

The measure of political unrest in North Carolina was indicated in the
autumn when a new delegation to Congress was chosen. Of the ten who
composed it, eight were new men. Though they did not stand for a clearly
defined program, they represented on the whole anti-Davis tendencies.
The Confederate Administration had failed to carry the day in the
North Carolina elections; and in Georgia there were even more sweeping
evidences of unrest. Of the ten representatives chosen for the Second
Congress nine had not sat in the First, and Georgia now was in the main
frankly anti-Davis. There had been set up at Richmond a new organ of
the Government called the Sentinel, which was more entirely under the
presidential shadow than even the Enquirer and the Courier. Speaking
of the elections, the Sentinel deplored the "upheaval of political
elements" revealed by the defeat of so many tried representatives whose
constituents had not returned them to the Second Congress.

What was Davis doing while the ground was thus being cut from under
his feet? For one thing he gave his endorsement to the formation
of "Confederate Societies" whose members bound themselves to take
Confederate money as legal tender. He wrote a letter to one such society
in Mississippi, praising it for attempting "by common consent to bring
down the prices of all articles to the standard of the soldiers' wages"
and adding that the passion of speculation had "seduced citizens of all
classes from a determined prosecution of the war to an effort to amass
money." The Sentinel advocated the establishment of a law fixing maximum
prices. The discussion of this proposal seems to make plain the raison
d'etre for the existence of the Sentinel. Even such stanch government
organs as the Enquirer and the Courier shied at the idea, but the
Mercury denounced it vigorously, giving long extracts from Thiers,
and discussed the mistakes, of the French Revolution with its "law of
maximum."

Davis, however, did not take an active part in the political campaign,
nor did the other members of the Government. It was not because of any
notion that the President should not leave the capital that Davis did
not visit the disaffe