The officer left the hall in disgust. "I thought I would exercise my rights as a belligerent," said Mr. Chester.
I ascended the steps of the Capitol and stood on the roof of the building to gaze upon the panorama, hardly surpassed in beauty anywhere,—a lovely combination of city, country, valley, hill, plain, field, forest, and foaming river. The events of four years came to remembrance. First, the secession of the state on the 17th of April, 1861, by the convention which sat with closed doors in the hall below, the threats of violence uttered against the Union delegates from the western counties, the wild tumult of the "People's Convention," so called, in Metropolitan Hall,—a body of Jacobins assembling to browbeat the convention in the Capitol; and when the ordinance was passed, the appearance of John Tyler, once President of the United States, with Governor Wise, among the fire-eaters, welcomed with noisy cheers; it seemed as if I could hear the voice of Tyler as he said that Virginia and the people of the South had submitted to aggression till secession was a duty, and that the Almighty would smile upon the work of that day. They were the words of a feeble old man, whose every official act was in the interest of slavery. Vehement the words of Wise, who imagined that the Yankees had seized one of his children as a hostage for himself.
"If they suppose," said he, "that hostages of my own heart's blood will stay my hand in a contest for the maintenance of sacred rights, they are mistaken. Affection for kindred, property, and life itself sink into insignificance in comparison with the overwhelming importance of public duty in such a crisis as this."
Mason, the lordly senator, and Governor Letcher, the drunken executive of the State, also addressed the crazy crowd, fired to a burning heat of madness by passion and whiskey.
On that occasion the Confederate flag was raised upon the flagstaff springing from the roof of the Capitol, although the State had not joined the Confederacy. The people were to vote on the question, and yet the Convention had enjoined that the act of secession should be kept a secret till Norfolk Navy Yard and Harper's Ferry Arsenal could be seized.[98] The newspapers of Richmond had no announcement to make the next morning that the State was no longer a member of the Union. What honorable, high-minded, "chivalrous" proceedings!
Then came the volunteers thronging the streets. Professor Jackson (Stonewall) was drilling the cadets. Three days after the passage of the ordinance of secession, troops were swarming in the yard around the Capitol, and A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, and Ex-President Tyler, and the drunken Letcher were negotiating an alliance offensive and defensive between the sovereign State of Virginia and the States already confederated to establish a slaveholding republic.
Next in order was the arrival of Jeff Davis and the perambulating government of the Confederacy, to tarry a few days in Richmond before proceeding to Washington. Davis and his followers made boastful promises of what they could and would do, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the hated Yankees. Then the hurly-burly,—the rush of volunteers, the arrival of troops, welcomed with cheers and smiles, the streets through which they passed strewn with flowers by the ladies of Richmond. The Confederate Congress and heads of departments came,—Stephens, Toombs, Cobb, Floyd, Wigfall, Memminger, Mallory,—with thousands of place-hunters, filling the city to overflowing, putting money into the pockets of the citizens,—not gold and silver, but Confederate currency, to be redeemed two years after the ratification of the treaty of peace with the United States. Beauregard, the rising star of the South, came from Charleston, to reap fresh laurels at Manassas. Richmond was solemn on that memorable Sabbath, the 21st of June, 1861, for through the forenoon the reports were that the Yankees were winning the day; but at night, when the news came from Davis that the "cowardly horde" was flying, panic-stricken, to Washington, how jubilant the crowd!
A year later there were pale faces, when the army of McClellan swept through Williamsburg. Jeff Davis packed up his furniture, and made preparations to leave the city. There was another fright when the Rebels came back discomfited from Fair Oaks.
From the roof of the Capitol anxious eyes watched the war-clouds rolling up from Mechanicsville and Cold Harbor. Those were mournful days. Long lines of ambulances, wagons, coaches, and carts, filled with wounded, filed through the streets. How fearful the slaughter to the Rebels in those memorable seven days' fighting! Deep the maledictions heaped upon the drunken Magruder for the carnage at Malvern Hill.
Beneath the roof on which I stood Stuart, Gregg, and Stonewall Jackson,—dead heroes of the Rebellion,—had reposed in state, mourned by the weeping multitude.