in Charleston, armed and equipped also, and am now mustering into camps of instruction 3,500 men. I have given Out 13,000 more arms than I got from the U. S. arsenal, so I have none now on hand, except some old muskets I am rifling and fixing up for active service, and only a few of them. If we are invaded in the fall, as we will be, unless we conquer again in Virginia, I shall have to meet at least 35,000 men. I trust I may be able to do so with my own troops, and if I cannot successfully defend the State, I can at least make it not worth conquering. If there is any man in this world I should like to aid it would be you, and I assure you I would do so if I could. I planted the first cannon, with an artillery officer and men, on the Mississippi River, above Memphis, and it was by my order that boats loaded with sugar, coffee, and molasses for Illinois and Ohio were fired into and stopped. I sent eleven heavy cannon and 25,000 pounds of powder, with shot, shell, and arrillerymen into North Carolina and planted them in the forts there. I sent 2,000 drilled men into Virginia, and my men were the first to march through the streets of Richmond, and I would have put 3,000 men into the navyyard at Gosport and taken it before it was burnt if your Governor would have allowed me. If my advice had been followed at Richmond I would have stormed Washington on the very day that Baltimore rose on the Massachusetts regiment. I wrote to your Governor and urged him the day after he got possession of the cannon at Gosport to plant them, with hot-shot batteries, immediately on the Potomac and to fire into all transport vessels, and to blow up the Long Bridge and plant batteries there and on Arlington Heights, all of which could have been done without the slightest difficulty, and it would have saved "Old Virginia" much blood and insult. My heart has been with you from the first, and I would make "Old Virginia" an universal graveyard for freemen, or make her, what she has always been, the banner State for constitutional liberty and independence. Go on, my dear sir, and lead your glorious legions from your mountains and your valleys, as they were led, in the days of our fist Revolution, by Campbell down to King's Mountain, where they made that mountain an everlasting monument erected to the brave and the free. May God bless you.

Yours, truly,

F. W. PICKENS.

[5.]

CAMP BEE, Alleghany County, Va., August 4, 1861.

His Excellency JEFFERSON DAVIS,

President of the Confederate States of America:

DEAR SIR: After two days' diligent inquiry, and from all sources of information here, and from the reports of some special messengers whom I dispatched in the direction of the enemy before I left Wythe, who have joined me here, I am in possessin of some facts which I deem in proper to communicate to you. The general impression strongly entertained throughout the whole country is that the retreat of General Wise was in fact a flight from the face of the enemy, for it is asserted that they entered his camp below Cahrleston fifteen minutes after his people left it, getting tents and other valuable property abandoned in their haste by our men. The impression has and is producing very injurious effects upon the public mind, even in the true and faithful portins of the country. The people from Kanawha to Wytheville are filled with alarm at the danger to them from laying open the lines of communication between them and the enemy's forces. These people have already crossed the Kanawha River and advanced