Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

Davis had, around Charleston, four or five thousand troops, fully armed and equipped, who had been organizing and drilling, with Beauregard in command. Here was a disciplined army, and one larger than could be got together elsewhere in the United States in ten days. Anderson had but seventy-five artillery men in all.

Leaving five hundred men to watch Anderson's seventy-five and work their batteries against the fort, why did not Davis cut the telegraph wires connecting with Washington, put say four thousand of his troops in the cars, and in thirty-six hours at farthest,--passing through the State of North Carolina, whose governor had refused to furnish any troops at the call of Lincoln, and through Virginia, which then had a convention called to pass an ordinance of secession, which they did on the 17th of April,--march his rebel column across Long Bridge, where there were no forces to oppose him, and capture Washington?

The temptation to do it must have been enormous and should have been controlling. The road was open, and he would have met no opposition. A large part of the officers of the regular troops then in Washington, as elsewhere, threw up their commissions then or soon afterwards. Lee, then relied upon by General Scott to command the Union forces, threw up his commission and took command of the rebel army of Virginia, on the 22d of April.

The prize to be won was gloriously magnificent. The capital of the nation, with its archives, its records and its treasure, and all of its executive organization, was there. He might not have captured the President and his secretaries, but their only safety would have been in flight to Philadelphia by sea, for they could not have got through the hostile city of Baltimore, except in disguise, as Lincoln came through that city to get to Washington before the 4th of March. There was no vessel by which to flee. The capture and occupation of Washington would almost have insured the Confederacy at once a place by recognition as a power among the nations of the earth.

The great hope and dependence of the Confederacy to bring the Rebellion to a favorable close lay in the recognition of its independence