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.

[129] there would be no war; that the mere act of secession would exact from the North all that was claimed, and prove in the end a peaceful experiment. Heated orators in Charleston exclaimed that there would be no conflict of arms, and that they would be willing to drink all the blood shed in the contest.

Again, when the Confederate Government was established at Montgomery the idea still prevailed that secession had the countenance of a large party in the North, and that the Black Republicans would find it impossible to get up a war in front of hostile States and in face of a partisan opposition at home. This idea had especial hold of the mind of President Davis. It has been thought a little strange that in the frame of the new government there should be such little originality; that it should have exhibited so few ideas of political administration higher than the Washington routine; and that the Montgomery statesmen and legislators should have fallen into an almost servile copy of the old Federal Constitution. This has been accounted for by the circumstance that the new administration of the affairs of the South naturally fell into the hands of old Washington politicians, who were barren of political novelty. But there is a more direct and especial explanation. It was expected that the assimilation of the Montgomery Constitution to that of the United States with some especial additions developing the democratic view and construction of that latter instrument would have the effect of conciliating, or, at least, of neutralizing the Democratic party in the North. In the address on the occasion of his inauguration, President Davis took especial pains t declare that the seceded States meditated a change only of the constituent parts, not the system of the government; and he distinctly referred to the expectation that, with a Constitution differing only from that of their fathers, in so far as it was explanatory of their well-known intent, freed from sectional conflicts, the States from which they had recently parted might seek to unite their fortunes with those of the new Confederacy, indeed, so far did this conceit go, that it was proposed in some of the Newspapers of the day-among them the New York Herald, then the affected friend of the South--that the Union should be “reconstructed” by the accession of the Northern States to the Montgomery Constitution, excluding perhaps the New England States, as odious to both parties in the reconstruction.

But no sooner did these silly prospects of amicable association with Northern Democrats end and war blaze out at Sumter, than a new delusion took possession of the Confederate leaders. This was that the war would be decided speedily, and its history be compassed in a few battlefields. It had been a theme of silly declamation that “the Yankees” would not fight; and so-called statesmen in the South expounded the doctrine that a commercial community, devoted to the pursuit of gain, could