r lives. In the
midst of the extraordinary conditions of war, they never talked as if
their problems were the problems of peace. Brown, on the other hand,
had but one way of reasoning--if we are to call it reasoning--and, with
Hannibal at the gates, talked as if the control of the situation were
still in his own hands.

While South Carolina, so grimly conscious of the reality of war and
the danger of internal discord, held off from the issue of state
sovereignty, the Brown faction in Georgia blithely pressed it home. A
bill for extending the conscription age which was heartily advocated
by the Mercury was as heartily condemned by Brown. To the President he
wrote announcing his continued opposition to a law which he declared
"encroaches upon the reserved rights of the State and strikes down
her sovereignty at a single blow." Though the Supreme Court of Georgia
pronounced the conscription acts constitutional, the Governor and his
faction did not cease to condemn them. Linton Stephens, as well as his
famous kinsman, took up the cudgels. In a speech before the Georgia
Legislature, in November, Linton Stephens borrowed almost exactly the
Governor's phraseology in denying the necessity for conscription, and
this continued to be the note of their faction throughout the war.
"Conscription checks enthusiasm," was ever their cry; "we are invincible
under a system of volunteering, we are lost with conscription."

Meanwhile the military authorities looked facts in the face and had a
different tale to tell. They complained that in various parts of the
country, especially in the mountain districts, they were unable to
obtain men. Lee reported that his army melted away before his eye and
asked for an increase of authority to compel stragglers to return. At
the same time Brown was quarreling with the Administration as to who
should name the officers of the Georgia troops. Zebulon B. Vance, the
newly elected Governor of North Carolina and an anti-Davis man, said
to the Legislature: "It is mortifying to find entire brigades of North
Carolina soldiers commanded by strangers, and in many cases our own
brave and war-worn colonels are made to give place to colonels from
distant States." In addition to such indications of discontent a vast
mass of evidence makes plain the opposition to conscription toward the
close of 1862 and the looseness of various parts of the military system.

It was a moment of intense excitement and of nervous strain