delight. Jonathan Worth wrote in his diary, on hearing that the
influential North Carolina Standard had come out for peace: "I
still abhor, as I always did, this accursed war and the wicked
men, North and South, who inaugurated it. The whole country at
the North and the South is a great military despotism." With such
discontent in the air, the elections in North Carolina drew near.
The feeling was intense and riots occurred. Newspaper offices
were demolished--among them Holden's, to destroy which a
detachment of passing soldiers converted itself into a mob. In
the western counties deserters from the army, combined in bands,
were joined by other deserters from Tennessee, and terrorized the
countryside. Governor Vance, alarmed at the progress which this
disorder was making, issued a proclamation imploring his
rebellious countrymen to conduct in a peaceable manner their
campaign for the repeal of obnoxious laws.

The measure of political unrest in North Carolina was indicated
in the autumn when a new delegation to Congress was chosen. Of
the ten who composed it, eight were new men. Though they did not
stand for a clearly defined program, they represented on the
whole anti-Davis tendencies. The Confederate Administration had
failed to carry the day in the North Carolina elections; and in
Georgia there were even more sweeping evidences of unrest. Of the
ten representatives chosen for the Second Congress nine had not
sat in the First, and Georgia now was in the main frankly
anti-Davis. There had been set up at Richmond a new organ of the
Government called the Sentinel, which was more entirely under the
presidential shadow than even the Enquirer and the Courier.
Speaking of the elections, the Sentinel deplored the "upheaval of
political elements" revealed by the defeat of so many tried