THE

CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY.

CHAPTER I.

The City of Montgomery, Alabama-The Birthplace of the Confederacy-Extent and Situation of the Original Confederacy-Her Resources and Population-Independent Spirit of the Slave-Owner-Testimony of Edmund Burke-The Non Slave-Owners-Traditions Inherited from Patrick Henry-Jealousy of State Rights-The Immigration from Virginia-Displacement of the Muscogees-Growth in Population and Wealth-The Study of Oratory-Political CustomsSocial Habits-General Quitman's Description of a Southern Home-Etc., Etc., Etc.

"If slavery was an evil, it bred the best race of men and women the world ever saw."

HORATIO SEYMOUR.

"For this much is certain: That if institutions are to be judged by their results in the composition of the councils of the Union, the slaveholders are much more ably represented than the simple freemen."

"In the progress of this affair, the distinctive character of the inhabitants of the several great divisions of the Union have been shown more in relief than perhaps in any national transaction since the establishment of the Constitution. It is perhaps accidental that the combination of talent and influence has been the greatest on the slave side.” JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

"He is a gentleman of the South; they have no property but land; and I am told his territory was immense. * ** It is not unlikely he may have lost his estates now; but that makes no difference to me. I shall treat him, and all Southern gentlemen, as our fathers treated the emigrant nobility of France,"

DISRAELI, in Lothair.

It was on the eventful evening of Saturday, February 16th, 1861, that an immense crowd of human beings, of all classes, sexes and colors, thronged the streets of the little city of Montgomery, in the State of Alabama,

and congregated in front of the Exchange Hotel, which overlooks the broad mart. The occasion for this immense assemblage, whose shouts of exultation rent the air, was the arrival in that city of the President elect of the Confederate States-JEFFERSON DAVIS.

In obedience to the call of the people who had assembled to greet him, Mr. Davis appeared upon the balcony of the hotel, accompanied by many distinguished men, whose names had long been eminent in the annals of the Union, and who were yet to become even more distinguished in the history of the ill-fated Confederacy.

Prominent among them was William Lowndes Yancey. Introducing Mr. Davis to the assembled multitude, the voice of the greatest orator ever produced by the South rung out like the notes of a clarion-"The hour and the man have met !"

The place of this remarkable meeting, Montgomery, was then a small city of twelve thousand inhabitants, standing at the navigable head of the Alabama river, and in the heart of that fertile band of rolling and wooded prairies which stretches itself, averaging a width of seventy-five miles, from the waters of the Savannah to those of the Mississippi.

Here is the great cotton belt of the Gulf States. Here is grown the larger proportion of the cotton production of the United States. Here it was that broad plantations covered the fairest land under the sky; where great wealth accumulated, and where was developed that highest and best pride of humanity which accompanies the possession of vast landed estates.

The beautiful city of Montgomery was the brightest of gems upon the belt of this fertile and happy region. Midway between the Gulf and the Tennessee, between

the Savannah and the Mississippi, she held the key to the Gulf States. North of her, and extending to the Tennessee, was a rolling country, rich in metallic ores, with fertile valleys, salubrious climate, and health-giving waters. South of her, the broad cotton lands rolled down to meet the pine forests of the coast, whose wealth of timber was fringed by groves of magnolia and orange.

It was the habit of many who were proud of the extent of the Union to deride the Confederacy at its earliest organization, when it embraced only the first seven seceding States, because it was so small a fraction of the United States. There was no occasion for derision or contempt. The country of which Montgomery was the immediate centre, covered an area as large as England and France combined.

The entire country of which she was then the capital, contained more than half a million square miles, or more than three hundred and thirty-six millions of acres. It embraced some of the most fertile and productive land to be found in either hemisphere, situated in a mild and healthful climate. It lay circling half around a vast inland sea, which covers a surface nearly as extensive as the Mediterranean, and draining river basins unparalleled in size and variety of products by any of those of the Eastern hemisphere.

This territory, of which Montgomery was the capital, is more extensive than the combined areas of France, Great Britain, Prussia, Bavaria, Belgium, and the Netherlands-countries which contain more than one hundred and five millions of inhabitants. It produces every commodity which is adapted to the soil and climate of these populous European nations; and yields, besides, the valuable staples-cotton, sugar and rice.

Its

mountains are rich with coal and iron, which lie close to the sea, and are easy of manipulation. At a lower price than elsewhere it is able to grow all the cotton needed for the world. Its production of rice and sugar is limited only by the amount of labor. Its timber for ship and house building is the most valuable in the world. It has every variety of climate, from the Appalachian range of mountains to the semi-tropical groves of Mobile and New Orleans. The health of this vast imperial domain stands as well in the medical reports as that of any other section of the Union.

Such was the site of the city in which was established the government of the Confederate States. The people who joined on the evening of February 16, 1861, in joyful greetings to the President elect were no less distinguished than the soil which gave them birth. They were of the highest type of the Anglo-Saxon.

Here and there throughout this broad dominion remain undiluted remnants of the French and Spanish families who first colonized the Gulf Coast, and other Franco-Latin vestiges of that great wave of adventurists which the empire of Charles V sent forth to the Indies and to the Gulf of Mexico; but these feeble off-shoots of South Europe were long since overshadowed by the great Anglo-Saxon immigration which planted the banner of King George, under Oglethorpe, upon the banks of the Savannah; which swept down from southwestern Virginia along the waters of the Tennessee; and which followed the course of the Ohio and the Mississippi to the bluffs of Vicksburg and Natchez.

It has been remarked that the American descendants of the English Saxons have acquired, as a race, a variety of their own: that in complexion, expression