When I went first to Baton Rouge, in 1859, en route to Alexandria, I found Captain Rickett’s company of artillery stationed in the arsenal, but soon after there was somewhat of a clamor on the Texas frontier about Brownsville, which induced the War Department to order Rickett’s company to that frontier.  I remember that Governor Moore remonstrated with the Secretary of War because so much dangerous property, composed of muskets, powder, etc., had been left by the United States unguarded, in a parish where the slave population was as five or six to one of whites; and it was on his official demand that the United States Government ordered Haskinss company to replace Rickett’s.  This company did not number forty men.  In the night of January 9th, about five hundred New Orleans militia, under command of a Colonel Wheat, went up from New Orleans by boat, landed, surrounded the arsenal, and demanded its surrender.  Haskins was of course unprepared for such a step, yet he at first resolved to defend the post as he best could with his small force.  But Bragg, who was an old army acquaintance of his, had a parley with him, exhibited to him the vastly superior force of his assailants, embracing two field-batteries, and offered to procure for him honorable terms, to march out with drums and colors, and to take unmolested passage in a boat up to St. Louis; alleging, further, that the old Union was at an end, and that a just settlement would be made between the two new fragments for all the property stored in the arsenal.  Of course it was Haskins’s duty to have defended his post to the death; but up to that time the national authorities in Washington had shown such pusillanimity, that the officers of the army knew not what to do.  The result, anyhow, was that Haskins surrendered his post, and at once embarked for St. Louis.  The arms and munitions stored in the arsenal were scattered—­some to Mississippi, some to New Orleans, some to Shreveport; and to me, at the Central Arsenal, were consigned two thousand muskets, three hundred Jager rifles, and a large amount of cartridges and ammunition.  The invoices were signed by the former ordnance-sergeant, Olodowski, as a captain of ordnance, and I think he continued such on General Bragg’s staff through the whole of the subsequent civil war.  These arms, etc., came up to me at Alexandria, with orders from Governor Moore to receipt for and account for them.  Thus I was made the receiver of stolen goods, and these goods the property of the United States.  This grated hard on my feelings as an ex-army-officer, and on counting the arms I noticed that they were packed in the old familiar boxes, with the “U.  S.” simply scratched off.  General G. Mason Graham had resigned as the chairman of the Executive Committee, and Dr. S. A. Smith, of Alexandria, then a member of the State Senate, had succeeded him as chairman, and acted as head of the Board of Supervisors.  At the time I was in most intimate correspondence