which the Confederate Government had stood aside waiting for
things somehow to right themselves. The Southern Congress had
been criminally slow in coming to conscription, contenting itself
with an army of 400,000 men that existed "on paper." "The most
distressing abuses were visible in the ill-regulated hygiene of
our camps." According to this book, the Confederate
Administration was solely to blame for the loss of Roanoke
Island. In calling that disaster "deeply humiliating," as he did
in a message to Congress, Davis was trying to shield his favorite
Benjamin at the cost of gallant soldiers who had been sacrificed
through his incapacity. Davis's promotion of Benjamin to the
State Department was an act of "ungracious and reckless defiance
of popular sentiment." The President was "not the man to consult
the sentiment and wisdom of the people; he desired to signalize
the infallibility of his own intellect in every measure of the
revolution and to identify, from motives of vanity, his own
personal genius with every event and detail of the remarkable
period of history in which he had been called upon to act. This
imperious conceit seemed to swallow up every other idea in his
mind." The generals "fretted under this pragmatism" of one whose
"vanity" directed the war "from his cushioned seat in Richmond"
by means of the one formula, "the defensive policy."

One of Pollard's chief accusations against the Confederate
Government was its failure to enforce the conscription law. His
paper, the Examiner, as well as the Mercury, supported Davis in
the policy of conscription, but both did their best, first, to
rob him of the credit for it and, secondly, to make his conduct
of the policy appear inefficient. Pollard claimed for the
Examiner the credit of having originated the policy of