complaint during this same year. Again the newspapers illumine
the situation. In the troubled autumn, Joseph Wheeler swept
across the northern counties of Alabama and in a daring ride,
with Federal cavalry hot on his trail, reached safety beyond the
Tennessee River. Here his pursuers turned back and, as their
horses had been broken by the swiftness of the pursuit, returning
slowly, they "gleaned the country" to replace their supplies.
Incidentally they pounced upon the town of Huntsville. "Their
appearance here," writes a local correspondent, "was so sudden
and...the contradictory reports of their whereabouts" had
been so baffling that the townspeople had found no time to
secrete things. The whole neighborhood was swept clean of cattle
and almost clean of provision. "We have not enough left," the
report continues, "to haul and plow with...and milch cows are
non est." Including "Stanley's big raid in July," this was the
twenty-first raid which Huntsville had endured that year. The
report closes with a bitter denunciation of the people of
southern Alabama who as yet do not know what war means, who are
accused of complete hardness of heart towards their suffering
fellow-countrymen and of caring only to make money out of war
prices.

When Davis sent his message to the Southern Congress at the
opening of the session of 1864, the desperate plight of the
middle Gulf country was at once a warning and a menace to the
Government. If the conditions of that debatable land should
extend eastward, there could be little doubt that the day of the
Confederacy was nearing its close. To remedy the situation west
of the main Confederate line, to prevent the growth of a similar
condition east of it, Davis urged Congress to revive the statute