Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/48

38 and distinguished member of Congress from North Carolina, and by appointment of Polk, minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary to Spain, with a special mandate to purchase Cuba and pay one hundred millions for it. His young daughters were with him and were introduced to court and presented to the queen. There they became intimate with Eugenie de Montijo, countess de Teba, who afterward became empress of the French. Mrs. Johnson was then in the prime of her youth, handsome, graceful, accomplished. She had left her comfortable home in Frederick with her little boy, a lad five years old, to follow her husband. She now volunteered to serve him. She was the only hope of Maryland. Captain Johnson applied to Colonel Jackson for advice in this emergency. Jackson ordered that Mrs. Johnson be furnished with escort and transportation and that she start at once. On May 24, 1861, she left the camp of Companies A and B at the Point of Rocks, escorted by Capt. Wilson Carey Nicholas, Company G, and Second-Lieut. G. M. E. Shearen, Company A, to go to Raleigh via Richmond. At Leesburg they found that Alexandria had that day been occupied by the Federals and thus communication southward cut. Returning, she and her staff went up to Harper's Ferry and thence by Winchester and Strasburg and Manassas Junction to Richmond and Raleigh, where she arrived on the night of the 27th. The next morning, accompanied by her father and her escort, she applied to Gov. Thomas H. Ellis and the council of state for arms for her husband and his men. There were on that council some plain countrymen, in their home spun, but they bore hearts of gold. It was a picturesque incident. Here this elegant, graceful, refined young lady, whose family was known to every man of them, and to some of whom she was personally known—there the circle of grave, plain old men taking in every word she uttered, watching every movement. Her father, Judge