Chapter 7:
The formation of the Confederate Government, and the resignation of officers of the Federal Army and Navy.
as I am not writing a history of the war, but only of a very small portion of the war, it cannot be expected that I will follow events in a connected train. I have detained the reader, so far, as to give him a continuous, though hasty glance, of the causes of the war, but having brought him down to the final rupture of the sections, I must leave him to supply for himself many a link, here and there, in the broken chain, as we proceed. Let him imagine then that the Southern States have seceded—the gallant little State of South Carolina setting her larger, and more powerful sisters, the example, on the 20th December, 1860—and that they have met at Montgomery, in Alabama, by their delegates in Congress, to form a new Confederacy; that a Provisional Government has been formed and that Mr. Jefferson Davis has been elected President, and Mr. Alexander H. Stephens Vice-President.The time had now come for the officers of the old Army, and Navy to make their election, as to which of the two Governments they would give their adhesion. There were no such questions then, as rebellion, and treason in the public mind. This was a Federal after-thought, when that Government began to get the better of us in the war. The Puritan, if he had been whipped, would have been a capital secessionist, and as meek, and humble as we could have desired. He would have been the first to make a ‘perpetual’ alliance with us, and to offer us inducements to give him the benefits of our trade. After the first drubbing we gave him, at Manassas, he was disposed to be quite reasonable, and the Federal Congress passed the conciliatory resolution I have quoted in a previous chapter,
