hundreds of mounted rangers and Texan youth under feeble Sibley.

From the first, Jefferson Davis's old army jealousies and hatred
of able men of individuality, hamstring the Southern cause.
A narrow-minded man is Davis, the slave of inveterate prejudice.
With dashing Earl Van Dorn, sturdy Ben Ewell, and dozens of veteran
cavalry leaders at his service, knowing every foot of the road,
he could have thrown his Confederate column into California. Three
months after Sumter's fall, California should have been captured.
Davis allows an old martinet to ruin the Confederate cause in the
Pacific.

The operation is so easy, so natural, and so necessary, that
it looks like fatuity to neglect the golden months of the fall of
1861.

Especially fitted for bold dashes with a daring leader, the Texans
throw themselves, later, uselessly against the flaming redoubts
of Corinth. They are thrown into mangled heaps before Battery
Robinett, dying for the South. Their military recklessness has
never been surpassed in the red record of war.

Though gallant in the field, President Jefferson Davis, seated
on a throne of cotton, gazes across the seas for England's help.
He craves the aid of France. He allows narrow prejudice to blind
him to any part of the great issue, save the military pageantry of
his unequalled Virginian army. It is the flower of the South, and
moves only on the sacred soil of Virginia. Davis, restrained by
antipathies, haughty, and distant, is deaf to the thrilling calls
of the West for that dashing column. It would have gained him