e. In May,
when the loan collapsed, there was nothing for it but to throw over his
dear friends of the Confederacy. Presently he had summoned Arman before
him, "rated him severely," and ordered him to make bona fide sales of
the ships to neutral powers. The Minister of Marine professed surprise
and indignation at Arman's trifling with the neutrality of the Imperial
Government. And that practically was the end of the episode.

Equally complete was the breakdown of the Confederate negotiations with
Mexico. General Preston was refused recognition. In those fierce days of
July when the fate of Atlanta was in the balance, the pride and despair
of the Confederate Government flared up in a haughty letter to Preston
reminding him that "it had never been the intention of this Government
to offer any arguments to the new Government of Mexico... nor to place
itself in any attitude other than that of complete equality," and
directing him to make no further overtures to the Mexican Emperor.

And then came the debacle in Georgia. On that same 20th of September
when Benjamin poured out in a letter to Slidell his stored-up bitterness
denouncing Napoleon, Davis, feeling the last crisis was upon him, left
Richmond to join the army in Georgia. His frame of mind he had already
expressed when he said, "We have no friends abroad."

Chapter IX. Desperate Remedies

The loss of Atlanta was the signal for another conflict of authority
within the Confederacy. Georgia was now in the condition in which
Alabama had found herself in the previous year. A great mobile army
of invaders lay encamped on her soil. And yet there was still a state
Government established at the capital. Inevitably the man who thought
of the situation from the point of view of what we should now call the
general staff, and the man who thought of it from the point of view of
a citizen of the invaded State, suffered each an intensification of
feeling, and each became determined to solve the problem in his own way.
The President of the Confederacy and the Governor of Georgia represented
these incompatible points of view.

The Governor, Joseph E. Brown, is one of the puzzling figures of
Confederate history. We have already encountered him as a dogged
opponent of the Administration. With the whole fabric of Southern life
toppling about his ears, Brown argued, quibbled, evaded, and became a
rallying-point of disaffection. That more eminent Georgian, Howell
Cobb, applied to