The Victory by Molly Elliot Seawell

The beginning of the fateful year of 1861 was full of events as dramatic as they were stupendous. State after State left the Union, her representatives withdrawing from the floors of Congress and her naval and military officers promptly resigning from the service of the United States. While these extraordinary and momentous changes were taking place all eyes were fixed upon the great State of Virginia, standing sentinel at the gateway between the North and the South. In case of Civil War all the world knew that she would be the battle ground. Her fields, rich and peaceful, where the harvesters had gleaned for two hundred years, would be drenched with blood and be swept by hurricanes of fire; the primeval woods over which an eternal peace had brooded would be torn by shot and riven by shell. The quiet towns would be starved and beleaguered and the placid country harried by fire and sword. Her people, who in the nineteenth century still lived in the calm and isolation of the eighteenth century and who had fallen into a happy lethargy, were to be suddenly transformed into an army of fighting men, and her women were to work and pray by night and day. Out of their placidity, which often degenerated into slothfulness, was to be evolved an almost superhuman energy. Her resources for war and siege would have been insignificant except that she held in reserve, ready to sacrifice at a moment's notice, all the blood, all the powers, and all the possessions of a race justly described as a strong, resolute, and ofttimes violent people.

By the opening of the year 1861 there was no longer doubt of what these people meant to do; but they thought and acted slowly, and they were long in doing what they had resolved from the beginning to do. Early in February a call had been issued for a convention to meet at Richmond to determine the destiny of Virginia. Richard Tremaine announced his candidacy for the honor of representing his county in this convention. He was so young, being barely twenty-seven years of age, that if he should get the suffrages of the people he would certainly be the youngest man in the whole assembly to which he aspired. His claims, however, put forward as they were with modesty and dignity, were received with favor.