This determined spirit of misrepresentation of the motives and conduct of the President, beginning thus early--respecting the origin of which we shall have more to say hereafter--was to prove productive of the most serious embarrassments to the Confederate cause. The first great success in arms achieved by the South, was to originate questions tending to excite distrust in the capacity of the Executive, and subsequently distrust of his treatment of those who were under his authority. Misrepresentation was not to cease with the attempt already mentioned to impair public confidence in Mr. Davis. A pragmatic interference with the plans of his generals was persistently charged upon him. The almost uninterrupted inactivity of the main army in Virginia, following the battle of Manassas, by which the enemy was permitted, without molestation, to organize a new army--a subject of constant and exasperated censure by the public--was falsely attributed to Mr. Davis' interference with Generals Johnston and Beauregard. It is a sad evidence of the license characteristic of a purely partisan criticism, that this falsely alleged interference has even been ascribed to the instigations of a mean envy of the popularity of those officers. The purely personal differences of public men are not the proper subject-matter of historical discussion. In the prosecution of our endeavor to give an intelligent and candid narrative of the events of the war, in so far as President Davis was connected with them, we shall have occasion to dwell upon those differences between himself and others respecting important questions of policy which are known to have existed. We do not see that the personal relations of President Davis with Generals Johnston and Beauregard, are here a subject of appropriate inquiry. Nor are those minor questions of detail as to the organization of the army, which arose between them, of such significance as to justify elaborate discussion here. That President Davis chose to exercise those plain privileges with which the Constitution invested him; that he should have consulted that military knowledge which his education and service had taught him; that he should make available his valuable experience as Minister of War; and that he should have failed to interpret the acts of Congress agreeably to the tastes of generals in the field, rather than according to his own judgment, is certainly singular evidence upon which to base charges of "pragmatism," "persecution," and "envy" of those generals.[42]