nite movement for peace. This project came to a head during the
next year in those grim days when Sherman was before Atlanta. Holden,
that champion of the opposition to tithes, became a candidate for
Governor against Vance, who was standing for reelection. Holden stated
his platform in the organ of his party "If the people of North Carolina
are for perpetual conscriptions, impressments and seizures to keep up
a perpetual, devastating and exhausting war, let them vote for Governor
Vance, for he is for`fighting it out now; but if they believe, from the
bitter experience of the last three years, that the sword can never
end it, and are in favor of steps being taken by the State to urge
negotiations by the general government for an honorable and speedy
peace, they must vote for Mr. Holden."

As Holden, however, was beaten by a vote that stood about three to one,
Governor Vance continued in power, but just what he stood for and just
what his supporters understood to be his policy would be hard to say.
A year earlier he was for attempting to negotiate peace, but though
professing to have come over to the war party he was never a cordial
supporter of the Confederacy. In a hundred ways he played upon the
strong local distrust of Richmond, and upon the feeling that North
Carolina was being exploited in the interests of the remainder of the
South. To cripple the efficiency of Confederate conscription was one of
his constant aims. Whatever his views of the struggle in which he
was engaged, they did not include either an appreciation of Southern
nationalism or the strategist's conception of war. Granted that the
other States were merely his allies, Vance pursued a course that might
justly have aroused their suspicion, for so far as he was able he
devoted the resources of the State wholly to the use of its own
citizens. The food and the manufactures of North Carolina were to be
used solely by its own troops, not by troops of the Confederacy raised
in other States. And yet, subsequent to his reelection, he was not a
figure in the movement to negotiate peace.

Meanwhile in Georgia, where secession had met with powerful opposition,
the policies of the Government had produced discontent not only with
the management of the war but with the war itself. And now Alexander
H. Stephens becomes, for a season, very nearly the central figure of
Confederate history. Early in 1864 the new act suspending the writ of
habeas corpus had aroused the w