The scenery near Richmond is very pretty, and rather English-looking. The view of the James River from the railway bridge is quite beautiful, though the water is rather low at present. The weather was extremely hot and oppressive, and, for the first time since I left Havana, I really suffered from the heat.
At 10 A.M. I called on General Cooper, Adjutant-General to the Confederate forces, and senior general in the army. He is brother-in-law to Mr Mason, the Southern Commissioner in London. I then called upon Mr Benjamin, the Secretary of State, who made an appointment with me to meet him at his house at 7 P.M. The public offices are handsome stone buildings, and seemed to be well arranged for business. I found at least as much difficulty in gaining access to the great men as there would be in European countries; but when once admitted, I was treated with the greatest courtesy. The anterooms were crowded with people patiently waiting for an audience.
The streets of Richmond are named and numbered in a most puzzling manner, and the greater part of the houses are not numbered at all. It is the most hilly city I have seen in America, and its population is unnaturally swollen since the commencement of the war. The fact of there being abundance of ice appeared to me an immense luxury, as I had never seen any before in the South; but it seems that the winters are quite severe in Northern Virginia.
I was sorry to hear in the highest quarters the gloomiest forebodings with regard to the fate of Vicksburg. This fortress is in fact _given up_, and all now despair of General Johnston's being able to effect anything towards its relief.
I kept my appointment with Mr Benjamin at 7 o'clock. He is a stout dapper little man, evidently of Hebrew extraction, and of undoubted talent. He is a Louisianian, and was senator for that state in the old United States Congress, and I believe he is accounted a very clever lawyer and a brilliant orator. He told me that he had filled the onerous post of Secretary of War during the first seven months of the Secession, and I can easily believe that he found it no sinecure. We conversed for a long time about the origin of secession, which he indignantly denied was brought about, as the Yankees assert, by the interested machinations of individuals. He declared that, for the last ten years, the Southern statesmen had openly stated in Congress what would take place; but the Northerners never would believe they were in earnest, and had often replied by the taunt, "The South was so bound to, and dependent on, the North, that _she couldn't be kicked out of the Union_."