Selection from Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative Vol. III that I thought was really good

More people should read this book

In a better place this book would be mandatory reading for every highschooler in America. It’s all right there. I encourage you to buy your copy today.

Intent as [Confederate President Jefferson Davis] was on gathering and bracing his scattered and diminished armies for the shock of an eastern Armageddon, Davis had the still harder concomitant task of preparing the nation at large for survival after the defeat made probable by the odds. He too was a military realist, in his way, and as such he knew that, far more important than the loss of any battle—even one on such a promised cataclysmic scale as this—was the possible loss of the will to fight by those behind the lines. There was where wars were ultimately won or lost, and already there were signs that this will, though yet unbroken, was about to crumble. “It is not unwillingness to oppose the enemy,” Governor Magrath informed him from threatened South Carolina, “but a chilling apprehension of the futility of doing so which affects the people.” Just so: and Davis took as his chief responsibility, as the people’s leader, the task of replacing this chill with the warmth of resolution. Whatever the odds, whatever the losses, he believed that so long as they had that, to anything like the degree that he possessed it, their desperate bid for membership in the family of nations could never be annulled.

His need to rally the public behind him had never been more acute, but neither had it ever been more stringently opposed by his political adversaries, who saw in the current dilemma a fulfillment of all the woes they had predicted from the outset if Congress continued to let him have his way on such issues as conscription and the periodic suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, in violation of the rights not only of the states but also of individuals. Under the press of circumstance, Davis by now had gone beyond such preconceptions. “If the Confederacy falls,” he told one congressman in a fruitless effort to bring him over, “there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.”

That might be; still, the hard-line States Righters could not see it. Desist from such wicked practices, they were saying, and volunteers would flock again to the colors in numbers sufficient to fling the invader back across the Mason-Dixon line.