Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/637

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-1865] The Confederate Congress. 605 G. W. Randolph and James E. Seddon of Virginia; the Secretary of the Navy, S. R. Mallory of Florida; and the Postmaster-General, John R. Regan of Texas, the last survivor of the Confederate Cabinet. The three Congresses of the Confederacy the Provisional Congress sitting from February 4, 1861, to February 18, 1862; the first Permanent Congress, from February 22, 1862, to February 18, 1863, and the second Permanent Congress, from May 2, 1864, to March 18, 1865 were made up to a considerable extent of former members of the United States Congress. Of these Howell Cobb was perhaps the most distinguished. He had been the Speaker of the House during the thirty-first Congress, then Governor of Georgia, later in the Federal Congress again, and then in President Buchanan's Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury till the culmination of the Secession movement. He served as Speaker of the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, and afterwards in the field, though he saw little service. Other men of mark in the Confederate Congresses were: Robert W. Barnwell, an extreme secessionist ; J. L. M. Curry of Alabama, a former member of his State legislature and of the United States Congress; he subsequently served in the Southern army, after the war became prominent in educa- tional matters, and, under President Cleveland, was minister to Spain; William L. Yancey, another extremist, till his death in 1863 senator from Alabama; Benjamin H. Hill and Augustus H. Keenan of Georgia, representing the moderates; senator James L. Orr of South Carolina, also representing the moderate champions of the South; John A. Campbell, before the war an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and later an Assistant Secretary of War under the Con- federacy, and a member of the ineffective Peace Convention of February, 1865; and Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana, a prominent member of the Ways and Means Committee. Outside the Congress a few names are worthy of mention: those of Judge Andrew G. Magrath of the Confederate Court in South Carolina, which dealt with many important constitutional questions; of Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina, and Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, both of whom were prominent in the conflict between the State and central authorities; of William W. Holden, an unsuccessful candidate for the governorship of North Carolina in 1864, when he headed the peace party; and of E. A. Pollard, journalist and historian, principal editor of the Richmond Examiner, and a bitter critic of the Davis Administration. In their provisional and permanent Constitutions the latter of which came into effect on February 22, 1862 the Southerners took the opportunity to emphasise their position in the great political controversies of previous years, and also to correct certain supposed defects of the United States Constitution, which document they otherwise faithfully copied. The Southern view of the rights of the individual States was embodied in the preamble and in various other sections of both CH. XIX.