“Like so many individual participants in the national blood-letting, Alexandrians going to [civil] war were simply fulfilling their duty, upholding personal honor, not caught up in the political argument over a state’s right to secede or the moral argument of owning slaves,” George Kundahl wrote. Until President Lincoln responded to the Confederate firing on Ft. Sumter in April 1861. “I have received your communication, mailed [April 15th] in which I am requested to detach from the Militia of the State of Virginia ‘the quota designated in a table,’ which you append, ‘to serve as infantry or riflemen for the period of three months, unless sooner discharged,’” Governor John Letcher wrote the Secretary of War on April 16, 1861. The Secretary asked the states for 75,000 soldiers. “In reply…I have only to say that the Militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view,” Letcher continued. “Your object is to subjugate the Southern states, and a requisition made upon me for such an object—an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the Act of 1795, will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war and, having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined by the Administration and exhibited towards the South.” Like South Carolina before, Virginia seceded from the Union. During the Civil War, Alexandria, occupied as of May 24, 1861, functioned primarily as a military base. Railroads and the Potomac waterway combined to form a Federal transportation hub. In 1861 three railroads entered Alexandria. Another operated river steamers between its rail terminus at Aquia Creek and the city. “We landed at Alexandria and saw as melancholy and miserable a town as the mind of…