Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Poetry and Incidents., Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

Washington, April 27.--A gentleman from Richmond this morning, gives some information of the feeling prevalent there. He represents it as a perfect reign of terror, and an excitement that he never saw paralleled. The troops in the city, he thinks a fine, hardy body of men, but ignorant beyond belief. It is upon the ignorance of these men that the leaders play. Some of the statements he heard made, would hardly be credited as the assertions of sane men. He listened to one man who publicly stated that the Seventh Regiment had been cut to pieces in the streets of Annapolis, and that he himself saw more than 100 of their dead bodies lying in the streets of that city. Another man he heard assure the crowd that the Massachusetts vagabonds (her glorious volunteers) [57] had been quartered in the Capitol at Washington, and had amused themselves by running their bayonets through the pictures which adorned it, and that the rich hangings of the different rooms have been pulled down and made into blankets and wrappers for the use of the troops.

Another man, who was organizing a corps of infantry, told them they had nothing to do but to march to glory and wealth. “What,” said he, “could a Northern army do on our sterile hills — they would starve to death. But you,” he continued, “have but to march to Washington, and lay that in ashes — then to Philadelphia, which is rich in all kinds of wealth — from that through all the North; there is a village every five miles, and every village has a bank, and every bank has a vault of specie, and you have but to help yourselves.” --Cor. N. Y. Times, May 1.