"...presenting the new coalition regime in the Confederate Congress as nonpartisan and rather as a united front meant to bring a tangible peace about more effectively; the decisive losses at Nashville and Hilton Head put paid to such delusions, and suddenly even the small boost in morale from February's successful Occoquan Offensive was insufficient to improve the mood in Richmond. The damage had in part already been done, though; Martin's putsch had been meant to place all blame for the war's failures on an inept White House led by President Smith and his chief defender in Congress in Senator Tillman, and soon thereafter the two worst losses of the war had been inflicted upon the CSA. Red Scarves marched in the streets of Richmond daily demanding more money be spent on the war effort and harassing men, often wounded veterans, whom they encountered with the question of why they were not at the front; in an infamous incident, a cavalry officer named William Tilly scoffed, showed his shrapnel wounds on his left side and demanded to know why his accusers were themselves not fighting, an altercation that ended in Tilly's stabbing death.
The National Alliance for Victory that Martin had transactionally cobbled together to enhance his own power was not so much an ideological big tent as a complete circus, and Martin quickly set about placing cronies such as fellow Virginian Claude Swanson, Murphy Foster of Louisiana and Duncan Fletcher of Florida on key committees while handing out choice chairmanships to his new fellow travelers like Georgia's Thomas Hardwick. Questions of conscription and patronage had already helped trigger a political crisis in Texas and Martin was keen to avoid any further deterioration of the domestic unity, and so he knew that speed was of the essence. Smith, despite being profoundly weak, would be at Heritage House until February, but the Alliance for Victory needed to keep its foot on the neck of any attempt by the Tillmanite remnant to join forces with what remained of the NFLP or Socialist Parties at fight them back, and so Martin made his fateful decision to work to coopt the Red Scarves militia into the superstructure of the new coalition government by making James Vardaman's personalist paramilitary into the Alliance's paramilitary - Vardaman, a man about as far ideologically from Martin as it came, was his preferred choice to run for President. In return for allowing Martin a say on patronage appointments equal if not in excess of the power Tillman had held for over a decade, Vardaman would see the Bourbon wing of the Alliance stand down in his favor and allow the Red Scarves nearly free reign. It was a deal too good to pass up, and Vardaman quickly accepted, agreeing with Martin that the Confederacy needed a presumptive President in the wings ready to do battle in February.
More than a few Red Scarves felt betrayed by Vardaman's move to align with the despised planter class, but most of them were enthusiastic about the pugilistic hero of Confederate neo-populism rising to the top of the heap. It should be noted that both Vardaman and Martin were fairly certain that they could use the other; Vardaman was of the view that once in the Presidency he would simply purge his enemies and threaten others to get in line thanks to his small but devoted personal army of followers and rebuild the old Tillman machine in his image, whereas Martin thought Vardaman was "an upjumped cracker" whom he could make as much of a lame duck as Smith from the moment his hand would touch the Bible on February 22, 1916 and continue the slide into legislative supremacy in the Confederacy. For now, though, the two men continued to bury the hatchet as they had since their putsch against Tillman in January and Vardaman acquiesced to Martin's preferred choice of running mate, the Virginian Congressman George Patton, who like Vardaman had lost a son on the battlefields of Middle Tennessee and was regarded as a moderate Bourbon who had worked well with Democratic colleagues after the Great Schism of 1907.
The ticket compiled, Martin set about making sure that it faced no threats in any of the legislatures that his operation controlled and pushed rapidly for the absorption of wavering Democrats into a collection under his banner as quickly as he could. The rapid erosion of the Tillman machine at the federal level was starting to trickle downwards as the case for a united government under one party for the rest of the war began to appeal even to the strongest skeptics of traditional Bourbonism - that, and the threat of angry, oft-violent Red Scarves..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33