leadership was most important for the Confederacy.  It was the obstinacy of Davis that had protracted the War through the winter and spring of 1865, long after it was evident from the reports of Lee and of the other commanders that the resources of the Confederacy were exhausted and that any further struggle simply meant an inexcusable loss of life on both sides.  As a Northern soldier who has had experience in Southern prisons, I may be excused also from bearing in mind the fearful responsibility that rests upon Davis for the mismanagement of those prisons, a mismanagement which caused the death of thousands of brave men on the frozen slopes of Belle Isle, on the foul floors of Libby and Danville, and on the rotten ground used for three years as a living place and as a dying place within the stockade at Andersonville.  Davis received from month to month the reports of the conditions in these and in the other prisons of the Confederacy.  Davis could not have been unaware of the stupidity and the brutality of keeping prisoners in Richmond during the last winter of the War when the lines of road still open were absolutely inadequate to supply the troops in the trenches or the people of the town.  Reports were brought to Davis more than once from Andersonville showing that a large portion of the deaths that were there occurring were due to the vile and rotten condition of the hollow in which for years prisoners had been huddled together; but the appeal made to Richmond for permission to move the stockade to a clean and dry slope was put to one side as a matter of no importance.  The entire authority in the matter was in the hands of Davis and a word from him would have remedied some of the worst conditions.  He must share with General Winder, the immediate superintendent of the prisons, the responsibility for the heedless and brutal mismanagement,—­a mismanagement which brought death to thousands and which left thousands of others cripples for life.

As a result of the informal word given by Lincoln, it was generally understood, by all the officers, at least, in charge of posts and picket lines along the eastern slope, that Davis was not to be captured.  Unfortunately it had not proved possible to get this informal expression of a very important piece of policy conveyed throughout the lines farther west.  An enterprising and over-zealous captain of cavalry, riding across from the Mississippi to the coast, heard of Davis’s party in Florida and, “butting in,” captured, on May 10th, “the white elephant.”

The last commands of the Confederate army were surrendered with General Taylor in Louisiana on the 4th of May and with Kirby Smith in Texas on the 26th of May.  As Lincoln had foreshadowed, not a few complications resulted from this unfortunate capture of Davis, complications that were needlessly added to by the lack of clear-headedness or of definite policy on the part of a confused and vacillating President.  During the months in which