At every advance of Grant’s lines a new alarm was manifested in Richmond, the first proof of which was always a fresh rigor in enforcing the conscription laws and the arbitrary orders of the frightened authorities.  After the capture of Fort Harrison, north of the James, squads of guards were sent into the streets with directions to arrest every able-bodied man they met.  It is said that the medical boards were ordered to exempt no one capable of bearing arms for ten days.  Human nature will not endure such a strain as this, and desertion grew too common to punish.

As disaster increased, the Confederate government steadily lost ground in the confidence and respect of the Southern people.  Mr. Davis and his councilors were doing their best, but they no longer got any credit for it.  From every part of the Confederacy came complaints of what was done, demands for what was impossible to do.  Some of the States were in a condition near to counter-revolution.  A slow paralysis was benumbing the limbs of the insurrection, and even at the heart its vitality was plainly declining.  The Confederate Congress, which had hitherto been the mere register of the President’s will, now turned upon him.  On January 19 it passed a resolution making Lee general-in-chief of the army.  This Mr. Davis might have borne with patience, although it was intended as a notification that his meddling with military affairs must come to an end.  But far worse was the bitter necessity put upon him as a sequel to this act, of reappointing General Joseph E. Johnston to the command of the army which was to resist Sherman’s victorious march to the north.  Mr. Seddon, rebel Secretary of War, thinking his honor impugned by a vote of the Virginia delegation in Congress, resigned.  Warnings of serious demoralization came daily from the army, and disaffection was so rife in official circles in Richmond that it was not thought politic to call public attention to it by measures of repression.

It is curious and instructive to note how the act of emancipation had by this time virtually enforced itself in Richmond.  The value of slave property was gone.  It is true that a slave was still occasionally sold, at a price less than one tenth of what he would have brought before the war, but servants could be hired of their nominal owners for almost nothing—­merely enough to keep up a show of vassalage.  In effect, any one could hire a negro for his keeping—­which was all that anybody in Richmond, black or white, got for his work.  Even Mr. Davis had at last become docile to the stern teaching of events.  In his message of November he had recommended the employment of forty thousand slaves in the army—­not as soldiers, it is true, save in the last extremity—­with emancipation to come.