world. I doubt not that power will exert an influence mightier than armies or navies. We know that by an embargo we could soon place not only the United States, but many of the European powers, under the necessity of electing between such a recognition of our independence as we require, or domestic convulsions at home." Of this supposed omnipotent power, and the superior courage and prowess in arms of the people of the slave labor States, the leaders were continually boasting. Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, a wealthy slaveholder and a son of a New England schoolmaster, writing to a feminine relative in Schenectady, New York, on the 5th of February, 1861, after alluding to the dissolution of the Union, and saying, "We absolve you, by this, from all the sins of slavery, and take upon ourselves all its supposed sin and evil, openly before the world, and in the sight of God," remarked: "Let us alone. Let me tell you, my dear cousin, that if there is any attempt at war on the part of the North, we can soundly thrash them on any field of battle." "One Southron is equal to five Yankees in a fight!" exclaimed Yancey, in a speech at Selma. And the Convention at Montgomery proceeded to prepare for testing the relative strength of the two sections.
President Davis was authorized to accept one hundred thousand volunteers for six months, and to borrow $15,000,000 at the rate of eight per cent interest a year. Provision was  made for a navy and a postal revenue; and Davis was authorized to assume control of "all military operations between the Confederate States" or any of them, and powers foreign to them. The Convention recommended the several States to cede the forts and all other public establishments within their limits to the Confederate States; and P. G. T. Beauregard, a Louisiana creole, who had abandoned his flag, was appointed brigadier-general and ordered from New Orleans to the command of the insurgents at Charleston. Early in March a permanent constitution for the Confederacy was adopted; and a commission was appointed to proceed to Washington and make a settlement of all questions at issue between the "two governments," while the Confederate secretary of the treasury prepared to establish custom-houses along the frontiers of the Confederate States. After agreeing, by resolution, to accept a portion of the money belonging to the United States which Louisiana had unlawfully seized, the Convention adjourned. Their proceedings were never published, but constitute a part of the "Confederate archives" in the possession of the National Government.
Meanwhile Mr. Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, had assumed the office of expounder of the principles upon which the new government was founded. In a speech at Savannah, on the 21st of March, 1861, he declared that the immediate cause of the rebellion was African Slavery--the rock, he said, on which Mr. Jefferson declared the Union would split; but he doubted whether Mr. Jefferson understood the truth on which that rock stood. He believed the founders of the Republic held erroneous views on the subject of slavery, and that it was a false assumption of the fathers, put forth in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." He declared that the corner-stone of the new Confederacy rested "upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery
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