"After an absence of nearly two years," Jefferson Davis told the legislators assembled under the golden dome of his home-state Capitol on the day after Christmas, 1862 - twenty months and two weeks, to the day, since the guns of Charleston opened fire on Sumter to inaugurate the civil war no one could know was not yet halfway over - "I again find myself among those who, from the days of my childhood, have ever been the trusted objects of my affection, those for whose good I have ever striven and whose interests I have sometimes hoped I may have contributed to subserved....I left you to assume the duties which have devolved upon me as the representative of the new Confederacy.