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.* 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, VicePresident 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

*Rebel War Clerk's Diary, Vol. I. p. 24.

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, panicstricken, 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 warclouds 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.

Before me were Libby Prison and Belle Isle. What wretchedness and suffering there! Starvation for soldiers of the Union, within sight of the fertile fields of Manchester, waving with grain and alive with flocks and herds! Nearer the Capitol was the mansion of Jeff Davis, the slave-trader's jail and the slave-market. What agony and cries of distress within the

hearing of the Chief Magistrate of the Confederacy, as mothers pressed their infants to their breasts for the last time.

In front of the Capitol was the stone building erected by the United States, where for four years Jeff Davis had played the sovereign, where Benjamin, Memminger, Toombs, Mallory, Sedden, Trenholm, and Breckenridge had exercised authority, dispensing places of profit to their friends, who came in crowds to find exemption from conscription. Beyond, and on either side, was the forest of blackened chimneys, tottering walls, and smoking ruins of the fire which had swept away the accumulated wealth of years in a day. How terrible the retribution! Before the war there was quiet in the city, but there came a reign of terror, when ruffians ruled, when peaceful citizens dared not be abroad after dark. There was sorrow in every household for friends fallen in battle, and Poverty sat by many a hearthstone.

Hardest of all to bear was the charity of their enemies. Under the shadow of the Capitol the Christian and Sanitary Commissions were giving bread to the needy. Standing there upon the roof I could look down upon a throng of men, women, and children receiving food from the kind-hearted delegates, upon whose lips were no words of bitterness, but only the song of the angels," Peace on earth, good-will to men!"

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE CONFEDERATE LOAN.

THE attitude of Great Britain towards the United States during the Rebellion will make a strange chapter in history. The first steamship returning from that country after the firing upon Fort Sumter brought the intelligence that the British government had recognized the Rebels as belligerents. Mr. Adams, the newly appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, was on his way to London, but without waiting to hear what representations he might have to make, the ministry with unseemly haste gave encouragement to the Rebels.

Palmerston, Russell, the chief dignitaries of state, and of the Church also, with the London Times and Morning Post, espoused the cause of the slaveholders, while the weavers of Lancashire, though thrown out of employment by the blockade, gave their sympathies to the North. They were ignorant of the causes which led to hostilities. The English press informed them that it was the tariff; that the people of the South had a right to secede; that the United States had no right to restrain them; that the South was fighting for liberty: but notwithstanding this, the operatives, from the beginning, ranged themselves on the side of the Union. They stood in opposition to Palmerston and the peers of the realm, the press, the aristocracy, and the mill-owners. In this they were guided, perhaps, more by instinct than by reason.

They knew that in the North labor was free, but that the South had made slavery the corner-stone of their Confederacy. Their life was ever a battle, for Labor was the slave of Capital. They knew nothing of State rights, or the rights of belligerents, or of American tariffs, but instinct by a short road led them to the conclusion that the conflict was not merely national, but world-wide, and that the freemen of the North were fighting for the rights of men everywhere.

The London Times was foremost among the newspapers to prophesy the disruption of the Union. Its utterances were oracular. It claimed superior knowledge and a deeper insight of the American question than any of its contemporaries, and its opinions were accepted as truth by all Englishmen who approved the slaveholders' war. Ship-builders, cotton-brokers, and capitalists regulated their faith and works by the leading articles of that journal, and loaned their money to the South.

"The great republic is gone, and no serious attempt will be made by the North to save it," wrote Mr. W. H. Russell to the Times in April, 1861.

"General bankruptcy is inevitable, and agrarian and socialist riots may be expected very soon," was the despatch of that individual immediately after the battle of Bull Run.

The tradespeople of England believed him. The South was victor; the Confederacy was to become a nation. The agents of the South were already in England purchasing supplies, paying liberal prices. They found that Englishmen were ready to engage in any scheme of profit, - in running the blockade, building war-ships for the Confederate government, or selling arms and ammunition, in violation of the laws of the realm.

As a large number of letters written by Rebel agents and emissaries in England and France have fallen into my hands, I purpose in this chapter to give a résumé of their contents, which expose the secret history of the Cotton Loan.

Soon after the beginning of hostilities the Liverpool correspondent of the Times, Mr. James Spence, entered heartily into the support of the cause of the South. He was engaged in commercial pursuits, but found leisure not only to keep up his correspondence with the Times, but to write a book entitled the "American Union," in which he advocated the right of the South to secede, and extolled slavery as a superior condition of life for the laboring man.

"The negroes," said he, "have at all times abundant food: the sufferings of fireless winters are unknown to them, medical attendance is always at command; in old age there is no fear of a workhouse; their children are never a burden or a curse; their labor, though long, is neither difficult nor unhealthy. As a rule, they have their own ground and fowls and