[287]
for any appointment.
I am going to see the President for him after dinner.
Wigfall, of Texas, is here.
He promises to be as troublesome to us as he was to the Congress at Washington.
May 3.—We have in the Confederate States at least 100,000 stand of arms and ample ordnance for our necessities.
We have powder enough to furnish our troops for a year's active campaign and 2,500, 000 percussion caps. Governor Brown did a dirty trick in Georgia.
The convention ordered the arsenal at Augusta and the arms in it turned over to the government.
Brown secretly sent Rockwell up to Augusta and shipped all of the good arms to Savannah before the agent of the government could get there.
Under other circumstances it would be wrong, but at present it was disgraceful.
We have delayed declaring war for two days, waiting for the Virginia commission.
I wanted to act yesterday.
As soon as Congress adjourns Howell says he is going into his old district and raise a regiment for the war.
May 4.—Well we have cast the die and accepted the war forced upon us by Lincoln and the Abolitionists.
The bill was passed unanimously and wants only the signature of the President to become the law. The issue is with God.
He knows how earnestly I have enquired of him for guidance in this hour of trial.
There will be no fight at Fort Pickens for three weeks yet. Some of the most rabid secessionists here counsel delay in making another attack in order to let the fever at the North cool off. Our people are becoming daily more satisfied that they must sustain the government.
Leroy Napier took $40,000 in the Confederate loan and gave $10,000 to the volunteers and their families.
This is but an index of the popular feeling.
We may have a long and hard fought war, but I do not believe it.
May 6.—I made the acquaintance of General Beauregard this morning.
He is decidedly Frenchy in his appearance; a small thin man, slightly gray and very pleasant in conversation.
Why he was called here is left a secret to the administration.
May 7.—The Virginia delegates who were sworn in to-day have given us more confidence in that State.
She is in earnest.
In addition to this the good news of the secession of Arkansas and Tennessee have kept the cannon booming all day.
If we could only get rid of Lee Walker and Mallory1 and the Lord would kill off Governor Letcher and his General Gwynn at
This text is part of:
1 The Secretaries of War and Navy.
Richmond, VA. 1900.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.