The withdrawal of Rhett from active life was an incident of the congressional elections. He had consented to stand for Congress in the Third District of South Carolina but was defeated. The full explanation of the vote is still to be made plain; it seems clear, however, that South Carolina at this time knew its own mind quite positively. Five of the six representatives returned to the Second Congress, including Rhett's opponent, Lewis M. Ayer, had sat in the First Congress. The subsequent history of the South Carolina delegation and of the State Government shows that by 1863 South Carolina had become, broadly speaking, on almost all issues an anti-Davis State. And yet the largest personality and probably the ablest mind in the State was rejected as a candidate for Congress. No character in American history is a finer challenge to the biographer than this powerful figure of Rhett, who in 1861 at the supreme crisis of his life seemed the master of his world and yet in every lesser crisis was a comparative failure. As in Yancey, so in Rhett, there was something that fitted him to one great moment but did not fit him to others. There can be little doubt that his defeat at the polls of his own district deeply mortified him. He withdrew from politics, and though he doubtless, through the editorship of one of his sons, inspired the continued opposition of the Mercury to the Government, Rhett himself hardly reappears in Confederate history except for a single occasion during the debate a year later upon the burning question of arming the slaves. The year was marked by very bitter attacks upon President Davis on the part of the opposition press. The Mercury revived the issue of the conduct of the war which had for some time been overshadowed by other issues. In the spring, to be sure, things had begun to look brighter, and Chancellorsville had raised Lee's reputation to its zenith. The disasters of the summer, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, were for a time minimized by the Government and do not appear to have caused the alarm which their strategic importance might well have created. But when in the latter days of July the facts became generally known, the Mercury arraigned the President's conduct of the war as "a vast complication of incompetence and folly"; it condemned the whole scheme of the Northern invasion and maintained that Lee should have stood on the defensive while twenty or thirty thousand men were sent to the relief of Vicksburg. These two ideas it bitterly reiterated and in August went so far as to quote Macaulay's famous passage on Parliament's dread of a decisive victory over Charles and to apply it to Davis in unrestrained language that reminds one of Pollard.