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Chapter 5: Marylanders in the campaigns of 1861.
When
Virginia became one of the
Confederate States by the vote of her people, May 24, 1861, the Confederate government,
Mr. Jefferson Davis being
President, removed to
Richmond from
Montgomery, Ala., and assumed the charge of military operations all over the
Confederacy.
The fixed idea of
President Davis was that the first necessity was to save the
Confederate States from invasion; for invasion, he argued, would demoralize the negro population and make inefficient the labor of the
South behind the armies, which must rely on slave labor for food and clothes.
Therefore the Confederate government undertook to cover the entire front, from the
Chesapeake bay to the western frontier.
In carrying out this strategy, armies were collected in
Virginia at
Norfolk; at
Aquia Creek on the
Potomac; at
Manassas Junction, thirty miles from
Alexandria; at
Harper's Ferry, the junction of the
Shenandoah and Potomac and the mouth or entrance of the valley of
Virginia; and at
Grafton, west of the mountains on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.
At
Harper's Ferry the
Potomac and
Shenandoah break through the
Blue Ridge and form a gorge of surpassing grandeur and picturesqueness.
Mr. Jefferson once said in his notes of
Virginia that the view from
Loudoun heights on the
Virginia side was worth a voyage across the
Atlantic to see. The Virginians never got over it.
Harper's Ferry was
Thermopylae and
Mont Blanc combined.
It was an impregnable fortress of nature.
John Brown agreed with them—about the only thing he did agree with them about—and seized
Harper's Ferry as the base of his 50
