gathering at various points under Steuben, Clarke, Nelson, and others; but nowhere in Virginia was there yet an armed body capable of holding in check a regiment of regular troops led by an Arnold.

At full

The governor mounted his horse, and took command of the situation. His first orders were to stop transporting stores to Westham, and simply get every thing across the river, or into the river, anywhere so that Arnold could not easily reach it. Some hours he spent in superintending and urging on this work, first at Richmond, later at Westham, reaching Tuckahoe, where his family were, at one in the morning. There he remained long enough to assist them across the river, and see them safely on their way to a securer refuge, eight miles above; and then he galloped back along the James to a point opposite Westham, where, at daylight, he resumed his superintendence of the transfer of the public property. speed, on the same tired, unfed horse, he continued his ride towards Manchester, then a small village, opposite Richmond. Before he reached it, his horse sank under him exhausted, and he was obliged to leave the animal dying in the road. With saddle and bridle on his own back, he hurried on to the next farm-house for another horse. He could only borrow there a colt not yet broken, upon which he continued his journey; until, coming in sight of Richmond, he discovered the foe already in possession. After doing the little that was possible for the security of the public stores at Manchester, he rode away to the head-quarters of Baron Steuben, a few miles off, for consultation with the only educated soldier within his reach.

In war every thing, even the elements, seem sometimes to favor audacity. Arnold only remained in Richmond twenty-three hours; but so promptly had the governor acted, and so well was he seconded by the county militia and their officers, that Arnold only escaped with his nine hundred men through a timely change in the wind, which bore him down the river with the extraordinary swiftness of his ascent. In five days from the first summons, twenty-five hundred militia were on the traitor's path, and hundreds more coming in every hour; but the breeze wafted him away from them down the James, with the loss of thirty of his men, laid low by a whiff of musketry from a party of militia under Colonel Clarke. During the brief stay of the enemy near Richmond, they burned a cannon foun

dery, several of the public shanties, a few private houses, and a prodigious quantity of tobacco, besides throwing into the canal five tons of powder, and spoiling three hundred muskets.

After three days' absence from the capital, the governor returned, and affairs began to resume their usual train. For eighty-four hours his home had been the saddle. Arnold went plundering on to the mouth of the James, where he intrenched himself in the camp abandoned a few weeks before by Leslie.

A passionate desire pervaded the continent to have this traitor brought to justice; or, as Jefferson expressed it, "to drag him from those under whose wing he is now sheltered." When the governor learned the details of Arnold's retreat, he felt that a small band of cool, resolute men could have seized and carried him off; and he now proposed the scheme to an officer of militia. The men to aid him were drawn from the regiments of western Virginia, in whom the governor had "peculiar confidence." The band, he recommended, should be few in number, the smaller the better; and he left it to the discretion of the chief whether they should enter Arnold's camp as friends, or lie in wait for him without. "I will undertake,” he wrote, "if they are successful in bringing him off alive, that they shall receive five thousand guineas' reward among them; and, to men formed for such an enterprise, it must be a great incitement to know that their names will be recorded with glory in history with those of Van Wart, Paulding, and Williams." Arnold grew wary, however, and could not be caught.

From this time the civil government in Virginia was, in effect, almost suspended. The war was to be fought out upon Virginia soil and in Virginia waters; and it is an old saying, that, in the presence of contending armies, laws are silent. Arnold, Phillips, Cornwallis, Tarlton, Rochambeau, Greene, Steuben, Lafayette, Nelson, Washington, are the names that figure in the history of Virginia during the next nine months. Arnold, re-enforced and superseded by Phillips, ravaged one portion of the State, except when checked by Steuben and Lafayette. Cornwallis and Tarlton, long retarded and eluded by Greene, swept over the border at last. Indians threatened the western counties; and fleets arrived, departed, contended, on the eastern shores. All that Virginia had of manhood, resources, credit, ability, was enlisted in the cause; and so many men were in service during the planting season, that the governor

feared there would not be food enough raised for the year's necessities.

Jefferson, in the midst of this agonizing chaos, did whatever was possible to supply and re-enforce Greene, Steuben, Lafayette: the burden of his cry to Washington, to Congress, being always "the fatal want of arms." The need of arms became at length so pressing, that, after "knocking at the door of Congress" by letter for many months, he requested Harrison, Speaker of the Assembly, to go to Philadelphia, and beg Congress in person, if they could not assign to Virginia a proper supply of arms, to at least repay Virginia the arms she had lent for the protection of the Carolinas. Power little short of absolute was conferred upon the governor by the legislature at one of its hurried spring sessions. He was authorized to call out the whole of the militia; to impress all wagons, horses, food, clothing, accoutrements, negroes; to arrest the disaffected and banish the disloyal. He was empowered, also, to emit the magnificent sum of fifteen millions of dollars, in addition to the hundred and twenty millions previously issued in the same month, the whole amount being worth then about twenty-seven thousand golden guineas. But all this availed little. Virginia wanted muskets,— wanted them, not merely for the great operations of the war, but for daily and nightly and hourly defence against predatory bands. Governor Jefferson could not furnish them.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO.

FOUR times in the spring of 1871 the legislature of Virginia were obliged to adjourn in haste, and fly before the coming or the menace of an enemy. First in January, when Arnold plundered the capital. Next in March, when every act was hurried through from fear of another interruption. Then in May, when an attack seemed so imminent, that the few members who had come together gave up trying to legislate at Richmond, and separated to meet at Charlottesville, under the shadow of Monticello, little thinking that the storm of war was about to sweep over Albemarle also.

The day appointed for the assembling of the legislature at Charlottesville was May 24. The governor's second term of service would expire on the 1st of June; but, amid the hurry and alarm of the time, the Assembly had as yet found no opportunity to attend to an election. There was no quorum till the 28th, when a speaker was chosen; but even then, such was the emergency, the House could not enter into the election of a governor. Cornwallis, with all his army, was five days' march distant, and the State seemed to lie at his mercy. Not a boat could cross the bay nor descend the James without risk of capture by the enemy's smaller craft. The civil government seemed a nullity at such a moment; and the governor, as the last hours of his term were gliding away, could only serve his State by explaining its situation to Congress and the commander-inchief. He felt that what Virginia needed then was a general, able, strong in the confidence of the people, acquainted with the State, one who would place himself in the centre of the crisis, rally around him every element of force Virginia possessed, and direct it upon the foe. He thought, moreover, that the seven thousand men of Cornwallis must be the enemy's principal force; and, under this impres

sion, he wrote to General Washington on the 28th of May, while a small quorum of the legislature were choosing their speaker within sight of his house: "Were it possible for this circumstance to justify in Your Excellency a determination to lend us your personal aid, it is evident from the universal voice that the presence of their beloved countryman, whose talents have so long been successfully employed in establishing the freedom of kindred States, to whose person they have still flattered themselves they retained some right, and have ever looked upon as their dernier resort in distress, that your appearance among them, I say, would restore full confidence of salvation, and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible."

The time had not yet come for Washington's appearance on this scene, though that time was not distant. The month of May expired. Jefferson was out of office, and Virginia had no governor.

The Speaker of the House, the President of the Council, and several members of both bodies, were his guests at Monticello, riding over from Charlottesville every afternoon after the business of the day was at an end.

Just before sunrise, June 4, 1781, while as yet the inhabitants of Monticello slept, except, perhaps, the early-waking master of the mansion, a horseman rode at full speed up the mountain, and sprang from his foaming steed at the door of the house. He was a gentleman of the neighborhood, named Jouitte, well known to Jefferson. He had been spending the evening before at a tavern in Louisa, twenty miles away, the county town of the next county eastward from Albemarle. An hour before midnight a body of British cavalry, two hundred and fifty in number, had galloped into the town, had come to a halt, dismounted, and proceeded to refresh man and beast with food and rest. Jouitte guessed that the object of such a band, so far from the actual seat of war, commanded, too, by the famous Tarlton, could be no other than the surprise of the governor and legislature of Virginia. He had his horse saddled; and, while Tarlton and his men were enjoying their three hours' halt at Louisa, he had struck into an old, disused road, a short cut, and ridden with all speed towards Charlottesville to give the alarm; making a slight detour on his way, to warn Mr. Jefferson and his friends at Monticello. He delivered his message there, and rode on to notify the rest of the members in the village.

The family, we are told, breakfasted as usual; after which, the