to others. There can be little doubt that his defeat at the polls
of his own district deeply mortified him. He withdrew from
politics, and though he doubtless, through the editorship of one
of his sons, inspired the continued opposition of the Mercury to
the Government, Rhett himself hardly reappears in Confederate
history except for a single occasion during the debate a year
later upon the burning question of arming the slaves.

The year was marked by very bitter attacks upon President Davis
on the part of the opposition press. The Mercury revived the
issue of the conduct of the war which had for some time been
overshadowed by other issues. In the spring, to be sure, things
had begun to look brighter, and Chancellorsville had raised Lee's
reputation to its zenith. The disasters of the summer, Gettysburg
and Vicksburg, were for a time minimized by the Government and do
not appear to have caused the alarm which their strategic
importance might well have created. But when in the latter days
of July the facts became generally known, the Mercury arraigned
the President's conduct of the war as "a vast complication of
incompetence and folly"; it condemned the whole scheme of the
Northern invasion and maintained that Lee should have stood on
the defensive while twenty or thirty thousand men were sent to
the relief of Vicksburg. These two ideas it bitterly reiterated
and in August went so far as to quote Macaulay's famous passage
on Parliament's dread of a decisive victory over Charles and to
apply it to Davis in unrestrained language that reminds one of
Pollard.

Equally unrestrained were the attacks upon other items of the
policy of the Confederate Government. The Impressment Law began