very and the Southern cause. Davis had other qualifications which
might seem to render him eminently fit to direct the policy of a
Confederation which must necessarily begin its existence by fighting and
winning a great and hazardous war. He had been a soldier and served with
distinction. Later he had been, by common consent, one of the best War
Secretaries that the United States had possessed. It was under his
administration that both Lee and McClellan, later to be arrayed against
each other, were sent to the Crimea to study modern war at first hand.

But Davis had faults of temper which often endangered and perhaps at
last ruined the cause he served. They can be best appreciated by reading
his own book. There is throughout a note of querulousness which weakens
one's sympathy for the hero of a lost cause. He is always explaining how
things ought to have happened, how the people of Kentucky ought to have
been angry with Lincoln instead of siding with him, and so on. One
understands at once how he was bested in democratic diplomacy by his
rival's lucid realism and unfailing instinct for dealing with men as
men. One understands also his continual quarrels with his generals,
though in that department he was from the first much better served than
was the Government at Washington. A sort of nervous irritability,
perhaps a part of what is called "the artistic temperament," is
everywhere perceptible. Nowhere does one find a touch of that spirit
which made Lincoln say, after an almost insolent rebuff to his personal
and official dignity from McClellan: "Well, I will hold his horse for
him if he will give us a victory."

The prize for which both parties were contending in the period of
diplomatic skirmishing which marks the opening months of Lincoln's
administration was the adherence of those Slave States which had not yet
seceded. So far disruptional doctrines had triumphed only in the Cotton
States. In Virginia Secession had been rejected by a very decided
majority, and the rejection had been confirmed by the result of the
subsequent elections for the State legislature. The Secessionists had
also seen their programme defeated in Tennessee, Arkansas, and North
Carolina, while Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland had as yet refused to
make any motion towards it. In Texas the general feeling was on the
whole Secessionist, but the Governor was a Unionist, and succeeded for a
time in preventing definite action. To keep these States loya