Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[374] steamer which Governor Pickens had bought in Richmond, for use in the defense of Charleston harbor. She was commissioned in March; and named Lady Davis, in honor of the wife of Jefferson Davis. She was armed with two 24-pounders, and. placed under the command of Lieutenant T. B. Huger, formerly of the United States Navy. This was the beginning of the “Confederate States Navy,” which never assumed formidable proportions excepting when ships, foreign built, armed, and manned, were permitted to enter the service. The number, character, and performances of the privateers commissioned by Davis and Toombs during the spring and early summer of 1861, will be considered hereafter.

S. R. Mallory.

With the hostile proclamations of the President and the Chief of the conspirators, the great conflict fairly began. There was no longer any tenable neutral ground for men to stand upon, and they at once, as we have observed in the case of prominent members of the Opposition in the Free-labor States, took positive positions. Two of the late candidates for the Presidency (Breckinridge and Bell) openly avowed their sympathy with the secessionists. Breckinridge, who afterward became a military leader in the rebellion, was cautious and treacherous. For a time he assumed the virtue of loyalty to the Constitution and the Union, and took his seat in the Senate of the United States, at the called session of Congress, in July. But his disguise was too thin to deceive anybody. So early as the 17th of April, he wrote to a friend at Louisville, saying:--“Kentucky should call a convention without delay, and Lincoln's extra session of Congress [in which he took a seat as a professedly loyal man] should be confronted by fifteen States. This alone can prevent a general civil war.” ¹ On the 20th, in a speech at Louisville, he echoed the voice of the Journal of that city in its denunciation of the President's call for troops.² He advised Kentuckians to remain neutral, but in the event of their being driven from that position, he declared it to be their duty to espouse the cause of the conspirators for the conservation of Slavery. Bell, bolder or more honest, openly linked his fortunes with those of the “Confederacy,” in a speech at Nashville, on the 23d of April, in which he declared that Tennessee was virtually “out of the Union,” and urged the people of his State to prepare for vigorous war upon the Government.³ The Governor (Harris) was at the same time working with all his might in the manipulation of machinery to array Tennessee, as a State, against the National Government. In this he was aided by an address to the people by professed friends of the Union, who counseled them to “decline joining either party; for in so doing they would at once terminate her [Tennessee's] grand mission of peacemaker between the ”