rath of Georgia, and Stephens had become
the mouthpiece of the opposition. In an address to the Legislature, he
condemned in most exaggerated language not only the Habeas Corpus Act
but also the new Conscription Act. Soon afterward he wrote a long
letter to Herschel V. Johnson, who, like himself, had been an enemy
of secession in 1861. He said that if Johnson doubted that the Habeas
Corpus Act was a blow struck at the very "vitals of liberty," then
he "would not believe though one were to rise from the dead." In this
extraordinary letter Stephens went on "most confidentially" to state his
attitude toward Davis thus "While I do not and never have regarded him
as a great man or statesman on a large scale, or a man of any marked
genius, yet I have regarded him as a man of good intentions, weak and
vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm. Am
now beginning to doubt his good intentions.... His whole policy on the
organization and discipline of the army is perfectly consistent with the
hypothesis that he is aiming at absolute power."

That a man of Stephens's ability should have dealt in fustian like this
in the most dreadful moment of Confederate history is a psychological
problem that is not easily solved. To be sure, Stephens was an extreme
instance of the martinet of constitutionalism. He reminds us of those
old-fashioned generals of whom Macaulay said that they preferred to lose
a battle according to rule than win it by an exception. Such men find
it easy to transform into a bugaboo any one who appears to them to be
acting irregularly. Stephens in his own mind had so transformed
the President. The enormous difficulties and the wholly abnormal
circumstances which surrounded Davis counted with Stephens for nothing
at all, and he reasoned about the Administration as if it were operating
in a vacuum. Having come to this extraordinary position, Stephens passed
easily into a role that verged upon treason. *

* There can be no question that Stephens never did anything
which in his own mind was in the least disloyal. And yet it
was Stephens who, in the autumn of 1864, was singled out by
artful men as a possible figurehead in the conduct of a
separate peace negotiation with Sherman. A critic very
hostile to Stephens and his faction might here raise the
question as to what was at bottom the motive of Governor
Brown, in the autumn of 1864, in withdrawing the Georgia