With the opening of 1865 conditions in Alabama were not favorable to the war party: the old coöperationists, with other malcontents, were charging the Davis administration with every political crime; the state administration was disorganized in half the counties; deserters and stragglers were scattered throughout the state; and many of the state and county officials were disaffected. Those who were in favor of war were in the armies. Had the war continued until the August election, there is no doubt that an administration would have been elected which would have refused further support to the Confederacy. Had it not been for fear of the soldier element, the malcontents at home could have controlled affairs in the fall of 1864. For a year there had been indications that the discontented were thinking of a _coup d'état_ and an immediate close of the war. The formation of secret societies pledged to bring about peace was a sign of formidable discontent. The Peace Society It was after the reverses of 1863 that the enthusiasm of the people for the war very perceptibly declined. For the first time, many felt that perhaps after all their cause would not win, and that the horrors of war might be brought home to them by hostile invasion of their country. Public opinion was more or less despondent. There was a searching for scapegoats and a more pronounced hostility to the administration. The "cross-roads" statesmen were sure that a different policy under another leader would have been crowned with success, though what this policy should have been, perhaps no two would have agreed. This feeling was largely confined to the less well informed, but it was also found in a number of the old-time conservatives who would never believe that extreme measures were justifiable in any event, and who could never get over a feeling of horror at all that the Democrats might do. If left alone, they thought, time would have brought all things right in the end. It was as painful to them to think that Lincoln was marching armies over the fragments of the United States Constitution, as that the Davis administration was strangling state sovereignty in the Confederate States. Their minds never rose above the narrow legalism of their books. But they were few in numbers as compared with the more ignorant people (who were conscious only of dissatisfaction and suffering) who had willingly plunged into the war "to whip the Yankees in ninety days," and who now thought that all that had to be done to bring peace was to signify to the North a willingness to stop fighting. This course, many thought, need not result in a loss of their independence. Later they were minded to come back into the Union on the old terms, and later still they were ready to make peace without conditions and return to the Union. It seems never to have occurred to them that northern opinion had changed since 1861, and that severe terms of readmission would be exacted. The hardest condition likely to be