in reply to General Beauregard urging the enlistment of the slaves.  It must be understood that at this time Lee had all he could do to hold his own against Grant, growing weaker and weaker as the days rolled by, while Grant was being reinforced from all over the United States.  Lee had the solitary railroad by which to subsist his army.  Sherman had laid waste Georgia and was now on the eve of marching; through South Carolina.  The Army of the Trans-Mississippi was hopelessly cut off from the rest of the Confederacy.  The Mississippi River was impassable, to say nothing of the Federal pickets that lined its banks and the gunboats that patrolled its waters, so much so that one of our Generals is said to have made the report “that if a bird was dressed up in Confederate gray, it could not cross the Mississippi.”  Hood’s Army was a mere skeleton of its former self—­his men, some furloughed, others returned to their home without leave, so disheartened were they after the disastrous defeat in Tennessee.  Still all these conditions being known and understood by the authorities, they were yet hopeful.  Says Mr. Miles in Congress: 

“I cannot bring my mind to the conviction that arming our slaves will add to our military strength, while the prospective and inevitable evils resulting from such measures make me shrink back from such a step.  This can be when only on the very brink of the brink of the precipice of ruin.”

From such language from a Confederate Congressman, dark as the day looked on February 4th, 1865, the date of the letter, the people did not seem to feel that they were on the “brink of the precipice.”  Continuing, Mr. Miles goes on in a hopeful strain: 

“But I do not estimate him [speaking of Grant] as a soldier likely to decide the fate of battle.  We have on our rolls this side of the Mississippi four hundred and one thousand men, one hundred and seventy-five thousand effective and present.  We can easily keep in the field an effective force of two hundred thousand.  These are as many as we can well feed and clothe, and these are sufficient to prevent subjugation or the overrunning of our territory.”

How a man so well informed and familiar with the foregoing facts could hope for ultimate results, is hard to comprehend by people of this day and generation.  It was the plan of General Beauregard to concentrate all the available troops in North and South Carolina on the Saltkahatchie, to keep Sherman at bay until Dick Taylor, with the remnant of Hood’s Army, could come up, then fall back to the Edisto, where swamps are wide and difficult of passage, allow Sherman to cross over two of his corps, fall upon them with all the force possible, destroy or beat them back upon the center, then assail his flanks, and so double him up as to make extrication next to impossible.  But in case of failure here, to retire upon Branchville or Columbia, put up the strongest fortifications possible, withdraw all the troops from Charleston, Wilmington,