At first feeble in influence, this faction, by pertinacious and unscrupulous efforts, eventually became a source of embarrassment, and promoted the wide-spread division and distrust which, in the latter days of the Confederacy, were so ominous of the approaching catastrophe. Its earliest shafts were ostensibly not aimed at the President, since there was no evidence that the popular affection for Mr. Davis would brook assaults upon him, but assumed the shape of accusations against his constitutional advisers. A deliberate movement, cloaked in the disguise of respectful remonstrance and petition, sustained by demagogical speeches--which, though artfully designed, in many instances revealed the secret venom--was arranged, upon the assembling of the First Congress under the permanent Government, to revolutionize the cabinet of President Davis. Mr. Benjamin, the Secretary of War, and Mr. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy, were the objects of especial and most envenomed assault. They were assailed in Congress, and by a portion of the Richmond press, as directly chargeable with the late reverses. Yet it should have been plain that the most serious of these disasters were attributable chiefly to the overwhelming naval preponderance of the enemy--an advantage not to have been obviated entirely by any degree of foresight on the part of the Confederate naval secretary--and by a deficiency of soldiers, for which the country itself, and not Mr. Benjamin, was to be censured. The indisputable facts in the case were ample in the vindication of Mr. Mallory, as to the insufficient defenses of the Western rivers, now in Federal possession. The obvious dangers of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, as an avenue of access to the heart of the South, were not overlooked by the Government. The channels of these rivers are navigable during a large portion of the year, and the two streams gradually approach each other, as they pass from Tennessee into Kentucky, on their course to the Ohio, coming at one point within less than three miles of each other, and emptying their waters only ten miles apart. The facilities afforded by their proximity for combined military and naval operations, were necessarily apparent. The Government contemplated the defense of these streams by floating defenses the only means by which they could be debarred to the enemy. The Provisional Congress, however, by a most singular and fatal oversight of the recommendation of the Government, made no appropriation for floating defenses on the Tennessee and Cumberland, until the opportunity to prepare them had passed.