The English press is more Southern than the South itself.
While it sees everything black in the North, and everything white
_in the land of the “nigger’”,* people in the slave states themselves
do not by any means lull themselves with the “certainty of victory”
that The Times celebrates.

The Southern press, with one voice, raises cries of dismay at the
defeat at Corinth and accuses Generals Price and Van Dorn of
“incompetence and conceit”.*”* The Mobile Advertiser speaks of a
regiment, the 42nd Alabama, that went into battle on Friday” 530
men strong, numbered 300 men on Saturday and consisted of
only 10 men on Sunday evening. The rest were killed, captured,
wounded or otherwise lost in the meantime.‘ The Virginia papers
use similar language.

“It is clear,” says the Richmond Whig, “that the immediate purpose of our
Mississippi campaign has not been attained.” “It is to be feared,” says the Richmond
Enquirer, “that the outcome of this battle will have the most harmful effect on our
campaign in the West.”

This foreboding has come true, as the evacuation of Kentucky
by Bragg and the defeat of the Confederates at Nashville
(Tennessee) show.”

From the same source, the newspapers of Virginia, Georgia and
Alabama, we are getting interesting disclosures concerning the
conflict between the central government in Richmond and the
governments of the individual slave states. The occasion for the
conflict arose out of the last Conscription Act, in which the
© Mobile Advertiser and Register, October 10, 1862.— Ed.

Symptoms of Disintegration in Southern Confederacy 261

Congress extended military service far beyond the normal age.* A
certain Levingood was enrolled in Georgia under this Act and
arrested by an agent of the Confederacy, J. P. Bruce, because he
refused to serve. Levingood appealed to the highest court of
Elbert County (Georgia), which ordered his immediate release.
The extensive substantiation of the ruling says inter alia:

“The preamble to the constitution of the Confederacy is careful to emphasise
explicitly that the individual states are sovereign and independent. How can this be
said of Georgia if any militiaman can be forcibly removed from the control of his
commander? If the Congress in Richmond can pass a conscription act with
exceptions, what is to prevent it from passing a conscription act without exceptions
and thus enrolling the Governor, the Legislature, the judges, and thereby putting
an end to the entire state government?... For these and other reasons, it is hereby
ordered and decreed that the Conscription Act of the Congress is null and void
and has no force of law...”

Thus, the State of Georgia has forbidden conscription within its
borders, and the Confederate government did not dare to revoke
the prohibition.

Similar friction occurred in Virginia between the “individual
state” and the “league of individual states”. The source of the
dispute is the refusal of the state government to grant the agents
of Mr. Jefferson Davis the right to conscript the militiamen of
Virginia and enrol them in the Confederate army. The incident
led to an exchange of caustic letters between the Secretary of War?
and General J. B. Floyd, the notorious character who as Secretary
of War of the Union under President Buchanan prepared the
secession and in the process managed to “secede” notable portions
of the Treasury funds into his private coffers. This chief of the
secession, known in the North as “Floyd the thief”,“ now appears
as the champion of the rights of Virginia as against the
Confederacy. The Richmond Examiner comments, among other
things, on the correspondence between Floyd and the Secretary of
War:

“The entire correspondence is a good illustration of the resistance and hostility
that our state (Virginia) and its army have to suffer at the hands of those who
abuse the power of the Confederacy in Richmond. Virginia has been plagued with
endless burdens. But everything has limits, and the state will no longer tolerate the

repetition of injustice.... Virginia supplied almost all the arms, ammunition and
military supplies that won the battles of Bethel and Manassas. It gave the

a The Conscription Act was an amendment to the earlier Act to provide further
for the public defence.— Ed.

© Marx uses the English nickname and gives the German translation in
brackets.— Ed.

Confederate service, out of its own armouries and arsenals, 75,000 rifles and
muskets, 233 pieces of artillery and a magnificent arms factory. Its manpower
capable of bearing arms has been drained to the dregs in the service of the
Confederacy; it had to drive the enemy from its western frontier unaided, and is it
not a cause for indignation if the creatures of the Confederate government now
dare to make sport of it?”

In Texas, too, the repeated drawing-off of its adult male
population to the east has aroused antagonism towards the
Confederacy. On September 30, Mr. Oldham, the Texas represen-
tative, protested to the Congress in Richmond:

‘In the wild-goose expedition of Sibley, 3,500 picked troops were sent out from
Texas to perish in the arid plains of New Mexico. The result was to bring the
enemy to our borders, which he will cross in the winter. You have transported
Texas’ best troops east of the Mississippi, dragged them to Virginia, used them at
the points of greatest danger, where they were decimated. Three-fourths of every
Texas regiment sleep in the grave or have had to be discharged because of illness.
If this government continues to draw the able-bodied men out of Texas in this
manner in order to keep those regiments up to normal strength, Texas will be
ruined, irrevocably ruined. This is unjust and impolitic. My constituents have
families, property and their homeland to defend. I protest in their name against
transporting men from west of the Mississippi to the east and thus laying their own
country open to invasion by enemies from the north, east, west and south.”

Two things emerge from the foregoing quotations taken from
Southern journals. The coercive measures of the Confederate
government to swell the ranks of the army have gone too far. The
military resources are giving out. Secondly, and this is even more
decisive, the doctrine of the “states’ rights’’,* (the sovereignty of
states) with which the usurpers in Richmond gave the secession a
constitutional colouring,”*' is already beginning to turn against itself.
That is how little Mr. Jefferson Davis has succeeded in “making a

nation of the South”,” as his English admirer Gladstone boasted.