gton, Randolph, now housed the
young Congress of the new Confederacy. An hundred years of political,
military, legal, and social precedence were the inheritance of the men
chief in the cabinet, the council, and the camp. Stirring traditions
clung about every quarter of the town, now devoted to the offices of
administration, from the Mayo wharves to the lodgings of Washington and
Lafayette. On the stately square yonder, where the musing eye of the
rebel chief might study its history, stood the suggestive mansion where
Burr's treason was brought home to that first great rebel.

Not far distant the disdainful pointed out the tenement where Fremont
had instructed the Richmond youth in far other doctrines than those
which made him the abolitionist choice for President in after-times.
Royalist and republican glories mingled in the reliquary edifices that
met the wondering eyes of the provincial Confederates drawn to the
capital in the generous enthusiasm of that first prodigious achievement
at Bull Run. Here a royal Governor had dwelt, yonder a Bonaparte had
sojourned and beguiled the famous beauties of Powhatan, as the
patriarchs loved to call the city. A Lee was the chief of the military
staff, a Randolph ruled the war office; scions of the Washingtons family
filled a dozen subordinate places; the kin of Patrick Henry revived
their ancestor's glory by as zealous a devotion to the new revolution.
With personages like these in every office the society of the new
capital revived the brilliancy of the French Directory and also the
character of the States-General, while Holland held the Spains at bay.
The blockade had not yet pinched the affluent, nor beggared the
industries of the well-to-do. Always famous for a brilliant bar, a
learned judiciary, and a cultivated taste among its women, Richmond in
1861 was the ideal of a political, military, and social rendezvous of a
young nation.

The raw legions had been victorious in the first pitched battle of the
war on the plains of Manassas, and what might not be reasonably hoped
from them under the training of such muster-minds as Johnston,
Beauregard, Jackson, and Lee? Wasn't it the common talk among diplomats,
the concurrent opinion of the French and English press, the despairing
admission of the half-hearted and panic-stricken North, that one more
such decisive victory would bring the South peace and independence?
Wasn't it, indeed, well known among the favored juntas that those