lection on the motives of Congress as a deliberative body, and an
insult to public opinion."

So Congress wrangled and delayed while the wave of fire that was
Sherman's advance moved northward through the Carolinas. Columbia had
gone up in smoke while the Senate debated day after day--fifteen in
all--what to do with the compromise bill sent up to it from the House.
It was during this period that a new complication appears to have been
added to a situation which was already so hopelessly entangled, for this
was the time when Governor Magrath made a proposal to Governor Vance
for a league within the Confederacy, giving as his chief reason that
Virginia's interests were parting company with those of the lower
South. The same doubt of the upper South appears at various times in the
Mercury. And through all the tactics of the opposition runs the constant
effort to discredit Davis. The Mercury scoffed at the agitation for
negro soldiers as a mad attempt on the part of the Administration to
remedy its "myriad previous blunders."

In these terrible days, the mind of Davis hardened. He became possessed
by a lofty and intolerant confidence, an absolute conviction that, in
spite of all appearances, he was on the threshold of success. We may
safely ascribe to him in these days that illusory state of mind which
has characterized some of the greatest of men in their over-strained,
concluding periods. His extraordinary promises in his later messages,
a series of vain prophecies beginning with his speech at the African
Church, remind one of Napoleon after Leipzig refusing the Rhine as a
boundary. His nerves, too, were all but at the breaking point. He sent
the Senate a scolding message because of its delay in passing the
Negro Soldiers' Bill. The Senate answered in a report that was sharply
critical of his own course. Shortly afterward Congress adjourned
refusing his request for another suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus.

Davis had hinted at important matters he hoped soon to be able to submit
to Congress. What he had in mind was the last, the boldest, stroke of
this period of desperation. The policy of emancipation he and Benjamin
had accepted without reserve. They had at last perceived, too late, the
power of the anti-slavery movement in Europe. Though they had already
failed to coerce England through cotton and had been played with and
abandoned by Napoleon, they persisted in thinking that there was still a
chance for a thi