There were many others besides Maury who considered that Mallory’s administration of the Navy Department was inefficient. This is clearly shown by the fact that, on August 27, 1862, the Confederate Congress ordered a joint special committee of both houses to investigate the affairs of this department of the government. Its investigations extended from September 4, 1862 until March 24, 1863, and developed a great deal of evidence of inefficient management; but Mallory was too strong politically to be ousted from his position. Another severe critic of the Secretary of the Navy is Pollard who, in remarking on the great energy which the North from the beginning of the war displayed in naval preparations, declared, “The Confederate government showed a singular apathy with respect to any work of defense. The Confederate Congress had made large appropriations for the construction of gunboats on the Mississippi waters; there was the best navy-yard on the continent opposite Norfolk; there were valuable armories with their machinery at Richmond; and although the Confederate government was very far from competing with the naval resources of the enemy, yet there is no doubt, with the means and appliances at hand, it might have created a considerable fleet. In no respect was the improvidence of the government more forcibly illustrated than in the administration of its naval affairs; or its unfortunate choice of ministers more signally displayed than in the selection for Secretary of the Navy of Mr. Mallory of Florida, a notoriously weak man who was slow and blundering in his office and a butt in Congress for his ignorance of the river geography of the country”.[15] Soon after the moving of the Confederate capital to Richmond, Maury began to feel himself out of sympathy with the Southern political leaders. A week or so after the battle of Manassas he wrote that he had wished an offer of peace to be made after that victory, but that the politicians who had become generals wanted to increase their military reputation and had opposed such a step. He went so far as to draw up a peace message which he showed to the Governor of Virginia and other influential men. But it bore no fruit. “My peace message”, he declared, “is to go, I understand, after the next great victory. May it come soon!” He did not have a very high opinion of Davis’s statesmanship in those early months of the war, but considered him haughty and self-willed, and surrounded by shallow men whom he was using to further his own future re-election. He was particularly incensed with the inability of the administration to appreciate the importance of a navy, and he feared that, by ignoring this service, they would permit Virginia to be degraded. There was talk, he declared, of making New Orleans or Charleston the money capital, and that the government was run on the theory that the Confederacy belonged to Cottondom and that Cotton meant to rule.