rable of the three for the
existence of the Confederacy, lost influence almost from the moment
when his dream became established. Davis was partly responsible, for he
promptly sent him out of the country on the bootless English mission.
Thereafter, until his death in 1863, Yancey was a waning, overshadowed
figure, steadily lapsing into the background. It may be that those
critics are right who say he was only an agitator. The day of the
mere agitator was gone. Yancey passed rapidly into futile but bitter
antagonism to Davis. In this attitude he was soon to be matched by
Rhett.

The discontent of the Rhett faction because their leader was not given
the portfolio of the State Department found immediate voice. But the
conclusion drawn by some that Rhett's subsequent course sprang from
personal vindictiveness is trifling. He was too large a personality,
too well defined an intellect, to be thus explained. Very probably Davis
made his first great blunder in failing to propitiate the Rhett faction.
And yet few things are more certain than that the two men, the two
factions which they symbolized, could not have formed a permanent
alliance. Had Rhett entered the Cabinet he could not have remained in
it consistently for any considerable time. The measures in which,
presently, the Administration showed its hand were measures in which
Rhett could not acquiesce. From the start he was predestined to his
eventual position--the great, unavailing genius of the opposition.

As to the comparative ignoring of these leaders of secession by the
Government which secession had created, it is often said that the
explanation is to be found in a generous as well as politic desire
to put in office the moderates and even the conservatives. Davis,
relatively, was a moderate. Stephens was a conservative. Many of the
most pronounced opponents of secession were given places in the
public service. Toombs, who received the portfolio of State, though a
secessionist, was conspicuously a moderate when compared with Rhett and
Yancey. The adroit Benjamin, who became Attorney-General, had few points
in common with the great extremists of Alabama and South Carolina.

However, the dictum that the personnel of the new Government was a
triumph for conservatism over radicalism signifies little. There was
a division among Southerners which scarcely any of them had realized
except briefly in the premature battle over secession in 1851. It was
the division between