Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[480] was thus reduced, we may imagine how harsh had become the war, and how averse the people of the South to the demands of :ts necessities. Indeed, the Confederate Government had committed a great oversight in failing to enlist troops for the whole period of the war, when it first commenced; for, as is usual at the beginning of all political revolutions, great unanimity and patriotic zeal prevailed among the people throughout the country, which rendered that measure both feasible and easy. But lost opportunities seldom return. This important measure, so easy at the outset of the war, was quite impossible in its advanced stages, as the ardour of the people was cooled or abated by the hardships and vicissitudes inseparable from a state of hostility.

The most striking of these hardships was the want of food, the actual pang of starvation in the army. Provisions were very scarce all through the country, so much so as to excite fears of a famine. Poverty and its attendant necessities befell those who had never dreamed of want. Many families who had been reared in affluence and luxury, were in need of the common necessaries of life. Young, delicate ladies often had to perform menial offices, such as cooking and washing for their families, having lost their servants by the war, or having been driven by other necessities to the last resources of economy. In the army the suffering was more vital; and had it not been for the scanty additions of provisions and clothing, which the love of relatives and friends occasionally sent them, many of the troops would have been compelled to disband, or would have perished in their camps. As it was, desertions were rapidly taking place, as the rigour of winter came on. It required all the popularity of Gen. Lee, and the exercise of every available faculty of his mind, to keep even his veteran army in Virginia together. A tithe-tax was instituted by the Confederate Congress, by which it was hoped to furnish supplies to the armies; but this and all kindred measures on the subject of subsistence were so badly executed, that the results invariably disappointed the calculation.

Indeed, the subject of the Confederate commissariat was so closely connected with the general fortunes of the war; it did so much to determine its conclusion; it exhibits so many characteristic instances of maladministration in Richmond, that a distinct consideration of it here, up to the time we are now discussing, is not out of place, and will prepare the reader for much that is to follow in the general history of the war.

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History of the Confederate commissariat.

In January, 1862, a report was made to the Confederate Congress in Richmond, on the general administration of the Bureau of Subsistence, particularly with reference to certain contracts for obtaining supplies,