Meanwhile in Georgia, where secession had met with powerful opposition, the policies of the Government had produced discontent not only with the management of the war but with the war itself. And now Alexander H. Stephens becomes, for a season, very nearly the central figure of Confederate history. Early in 1864 the new act suspending the writ of habeas corpus had aroused the wrath of Georgia, and Stephens had become the mouthpiece of the opposition. In an address to the Legislature, he condemned in most exaggerated language not only the Habeas Corpus Act but also the new Conscription Act. Soon afterward he wrote a long letter to Herschel V. Johnson, who, like himself, had been an enemy of secession in 1861. He said that if Johnson doubted that the Habeas Corpus Act was a blow struck at the very "vitals of liberty," then he "would not believe though one were to rise from the dead." In this extraordinary letter Stephens went on "most confidentially" to state his attitude toward Davis thus: "While I do not and never have regarded him as a great man or statesman on a large scale, or a man of any marked genius, yet I have regarded him as a man of good intentions, weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm. Am now beginning to doubt his good intentions.... His whole policy on the organization and discipline of the army is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that he is aiming at absolute power." That a man of Stephens's ability should have dealt in fustian like this in the most dreadful moment of Confederate history is a psychological problem that is not easily solved. To be sure, Stephens was an extreme instance of the martinet of constitutionalism. He reminds us of those old-fashioned generals of whom Macaulay said that they preferred to lose a battle according to rule than win it by an exception. Such men find it easy to transform into a bugaboo any one who appears to them to be acting irregularly. Stephens in his own mind had so transformed the President. The enormous difficulties and the wholly abnormal circumstances which surrounded Davis counted with Stephens for nothing at all, and he reasoned about the Administration as if it were operating in a vacuum. Having come to this extraordinary position, Stephens passed easily into a rôle that verged upon treason. ¹