e evening after the fall of Sumter, to
a crazy crowd in Montgomery, then the Rebel capital.

"From the mountain-tops and valleys to the shores of the sea, there is
one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington City at all and
every human hazard. That filthy cage of unclean birds must and will
assuredly be purified by fire," shouted John Mitchell, through the
"Richmond Examiner," on the 23d of April.

"Washington City will soon be too hot to hold Abraham Lincoln and his
Government," wrote the editor of the "Raleigh Standard" on the 24th.

"We are in lively hope, that, before three months roll by, the
Government, Congress, Departments and all, will have been removed to the
present Federal capital," wrote the Montgomery correspondent of the
"Charleston Courier" on the 28th of the same month.

"We are not in the secrets of our authorities enough to specify the day
on which Jeff Davis will dine at the White House, and Ben McCullough
take his siesta in General Sickles's gilded tent. We should not like to
produce any disappointment by naming too soon or too early a day; but it
will save trouble, if the gentlemen will keep themselves in readiness to
dislodge at a moment's notice," said the "Richmond Whig" on the 22d of
May.

The Rebel Congress had already adjourned, and was on its way to
Richmond. Not only Congress, but all the Departments, were on the move,
intending to tarry at Richmond but a day or two, till General Scott, and
Abraham Lincoln, and the Yankees, who were swarming into Washington,
were driven out. Thus Richmond became, though only temporarily, as all
hands in the South supposed, the capital of the Confederacy.

A week later Jeff Davis was welcomed to Richmond by the people, says
Pollard, the author of the "Southern History of the War," an implacable
hater of the North, "with a burst of genuine joy and enthusiasm to which
none of the military pageants of the North could furnish a parallel."
President Davis, in response to the call of the populace, made a
speech, in which he said,--

"When the time and occasion serve, we shall smite the smiter with manly
arms, as did our fathers before us, and as becomes their sons. To the
enemy we leave the base _acts of the assassin and incendiary_; to them
we leave it to insult helpless women: to us belongs vengeance upon men.
We will make the battle-fields in Virginia another Buena Vista, drenched
with more precious blood than flowed there."

But Colonel Rob