Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 2

[353] and confidently calculated that a considerable force could thus be added to the rebel army; and, finally, the measure which was most antagonistic to the principles on which the rebellion was based was openly advocated. Even General Lee was in favor of arming the slaves.

This proposition was bitterly opposed, and added another element of discord to those that were rife all through the dissolving Confederacy; for the dissensions which came to a head in Richmond can only be likened to those in Jerusalem before its fall. Jefferson Davis was one of the most unpopular of men among those whom he called his people, and the inhabitants of the capital in which he dwelt were his bitterest enemies. He quarrelled with Beauregard and Bragg and Johnston by turns, and was jealous and overbearing towards Lee. He was denounced in the rebel congress and by the rebel newspapers, and many attributed to him all the disasters of the Confederacy. But he was not alone to blame, and it is probable that another leader of the sinking cause would have incurred the same censures and aroused the same animosities among his followers. The unsuccessful are apt to be acrimonious, and the quarrels of the rebels were no less violent among themselves than with their so-called President.

They vehemently accused each other of treason to the cause, perhaps because each felt that his own fealty was waning; and, if so, it was not strange. The suffering for food, the difficulty of supplying even the army with rations and the horses with fodder, the scarcity of fuel, the depreciation of the currency, the interruption of manufactures, the annihilation of ordinary commerce, the absorption of agriculture—all