The 13th spent no time at all in the capital city they would be defending from the Union, but ate their arrival breakfast and then marched down to the landing on the James River.

They boarded the steamboat Curtis Peck (similar to the one above), built in New York City in 1842 for service on the Hudson River. It was then owned by a Virginia company and was used for Confederate reconnaissance.

One of its former passengers was the American statesman and orator Daniel Webster. He later wrote of his 1849 journey down the winding James through the lowland meadows of the ancient slaveholding estates of Virginia’s first families.

The 13th’s destination was Kingsmill Wharf, about 130 miles downriver on the Virginia Peninsula, near Yorktown. They were to help reinforce Gen. John B. Magruder’s divisions against a Union assault moving north from Fortress Monroe.

Minutemen of Attala diarist Mike Hubbert stayed behind in Richmond to nurse his brother James who, like scores of other men in the regiment, was sick at Chimborazo Hospital.