The Richmond Daily Dispatch, best-selling of the city's four dailies, defended slavery as a financially vital financial.  It concluded, "If we would reduce Virginia to the deplorable condition of anarchy, poverty, and squalid wretchedness, exemplified in the worst Republics of Central or South America, we have but by fixing her destinies with the abolition North, to stampede her negroes and uproot her slave institution."   (By John Osborne)  

The Richmond, Virginia, city authorities announced the numbers of people arrested and detained in its two local police stations for March 1861.   During the month, the First Station House had held 62 white persons, 27 free blacks, and 66 slaves, and the Second Station House, 34 whites, 20 free blacks, and 29 slaves. The major cause of incarceration was given as "whiskey."  (By John Osborne)  

A large crowd gathered in the evening at Camp Hill in Henrico County just north of Richmond to raise the flag of the Confederacy.  A sixty-foot pole had been erected for the purpose on the farm of John D. Warren.  Poor weather forced the proceedings to be cut short.  The flag was raised, the band of the "Southern Guards" militia played "Dixie," and the gathering reassembled at the unit's drill hall to hear speeches calling for Virginia's immediate secession from the Union.  (By John Osborne)  

Alexander Ramsey, governor of Minnesota, and a Dickinson College alumni, was visiting Washington when the news from Fort Sumter reached the capital.  That morning, he went to the War Department and offered the services of Minnesota militia to Secretary Simon Cameron.  Knowing that Lincoln would call the next day for 75,000 volunteers, Cameron accepted Ramsey's written pledge and Minnesota became the first state to volunteer its men for the Union.  (By John Osborne)

Using George Ashmun, who knew both men, as a go-between, Abraham Lincoln met with Democratic leader Stephen Douglas in the evening at the White House to discuss the probable upcoming clash of arms with the South.  Douglas, who Lincoln defeated in the recent election of 1860, pledged his personal and political support to any measure to save the Union.  His voice was vital in the coming weeks to rally Democrats.  (By John Osborne)