A popular revulsion of feeling preceded and followed the great period of Confederate history--these six months of Titanic effort which embraced between March and September, 1862, splendid success along with catastrophes. But there was a marked difference between the two tides of popular emotion. The wave of alarm which swept over the South after the surrender of Fort Donelson was quickly translated into such a high passion for battle that the march of events until the day of Antietam resounded like an epic. The failure of the triple offensive which closed this period was followed in very many minds by the appearance of a new temper, often as valiant as the old but far more grim and deeply seamed with distrust. And how is this distrust, of which the Confederate Administration was the object, to be accounted for?
Various answers to this question were made at the time. The laws of the spring of 1862 were attacked as unconstitutional. Davis was held responsible for them and also for the slow equipment of the army. Because the Confederate Congress conducted much of its business in secret session, the President was charged with a love of mystery and an unwillingness to take the people into his confidence. Arrests under the law suspending the writ of habeas corpus were made the texts for harangues on liberty. The right of ******* of speech was dragged in when General Van Dorn, in the Southwest, threatened with suppression any newspaper that published anything which might impair confidence in a commanding officer. How could he have dared to do this, was the cry, unless the President was behind him? And when General Bragg assumed a similar attitude toward the press, the same cry was raised.
Throughout the summer of victories, even while the thrilling stories of Seven Pines, the Peninsula, Second Manassas, were sounding like trumpets, these mutterings of discontent formed an ominous accompaniment.
Yancey, speaking of the disturbed temper of the time, attributed it to the general lack of information on the part of Southern people as to what the Confederate Government was doing. His proposed remedy was an end of the censorship which that Government was attempting to maintain, the abandonment of the secret sessions of its Congress, and the taking of the people into its full confidence. Now a Senator from Alabama, he attempted, at the opening of the congressional session in the autumn of 1862, to abolish secret sessions, but in his efforts he was not successful.
There seems little doubt that the Confederate Government had blundered in being too secretive. Even from Congress, much information was withheld. A curious incident has preserved what appeared to the military mind the justification of this reticence. The Secretary of War refused to comply with a request for information, holding that be could not do so "without disclosing the strength of our armies to many persons of subordinate position whose secrecy cannot be relied upon." "I beg leave to remind you," said he, "of a report made in response to a similar one from the Federal Congress, communicated to them in secret session, and now a part of our archives."
How much the country was in the dark with regard to some vital matters is revealed by an attack on the Confederate Administration which was made by the Charleston Mercury, in February. The Southern Government was accused of unpardonable slowness in sending agents to Europe to purchase munitions. In point of fact, the Confederate Government had been more prompt than the Union Government in rushing agents abroad. But the country was not permitted to know this. Though the Courier was a government organ in Charleston, it did not meet the charges of the Mercury by disclosing the facts about the arduous attempts of the Confederate Government to secure arms in Europe. The reply of the Courier to the Mercury, though spirited, was all in general terms. "To shake confidence in Jefferson Davis," said the Courier, "is...to bring 'hideous ruin and combustion' down upon our dearest hopes and interests." It made "Mr. Davis and his defensive policy" objects of all admiration; called Davis "our Moses." It was deeply indignant because it had been "reliably informed that men of high official position among us" were "calling for a General Convention of the Confederate States to depose him and set up a military Dictator in his place." The Mercury retorted that, as to the plot against "our Moses," there was no evidence of its existence except the Courier's assertion.
Nevertheless, it considered Davis "an incubus to the cause." The controversy between the Mercury and the Courier at Charleston was paralleled at Richmond by the constant bickering between the government organ, the Enquirer, and the Examiner, which shares with the Mercury the first place among the newspapers hostile to Davis.*
* The Confederate Government did not misapprehend the attitude of the intellectual opposition. Its foreign organ, The Index, published in London, characterized the leading Southern papers for the enlightenment of the British public. While the Enquirer and the Courier were singled out as the great champions of the Confederate Government, the Examiner and the Mercury were portrayed as its arch enemies. The Examiner was called the "Ishmael of the Southern press." The Mercury was described as "almost rabid on the subject of state rights."