f $28.69. She then offered the whole certificate for the taxes. This
was refused. This apparent injustice touched her far more than the
amount of the taxes."

A letter addressed to the President from Griffin, Georgia, contained
this dreary picture:

"Unless something is done and that speedily, there will be thousands
of the best citizens of the State and heretofore as loyal as any in the
Confederacy, that will not care one cent which army is victorious in
Georgia.... Since August last there have been thousands of cavalry
and wagon trains feeding upon our cornfields and for which our
quartermasters and officers in command of trains, regiments, battalions,
companies, and squads, have been giving the farmers receipts, and we
were all told these receipts would pay our government taxes and tithing;
and yet not one of them will be taken by our collector.... And yet we
are threatened with having our lands sold for taxes. Our scrip for
corn used by our generals will not be taken.... How is it that we have
certified claims upon our Government, past due ten months, and when we
enter the quartermaster's office we see placed up conspicuously in large
letters "no funds." Some of these said quartermasters [who] four years
ago were not worth the clothes upon their backs, are now large dealers
in lands, negroes, and real estate."

There was almost universal complaint that government contractors
were speculating in supplies and that the Impressment Law was used by
officials to cover their robbery of both the Government and the people.
Allowing for all the panic of the moment, one is forced to conclude that
the smoke is too dense not to cover a good deal of fire. In a word,
at the very time when local patriotism everywhere was drifting into
opposition to the general military command and when Congress was
reflecting this widespread loss of confidence, the Government was loudly
charged with inability to restrain graft. In all these accusations there
was much injustice. Conditions that the Government was powerless to
control were cruelly exaggerated, and the motives of the Government were
falsified. For all this exaggeration and falsification the press was
largely to blame. Moreover, the press, at least in dangerously
large proportion, was schooling the people to hold Davis personally
responsible for all their suffering. General Bragg was informed in a
letter from a correspondent in Mobile that "men have been taught to look
upon the Pres