Memoir 2, Page 103, The Confederate Congress

"[I had a distant view of the edifice which the first rebel] Congress desecrated by their treansonable broodings."

From February to May of 1861, delegates from the first seven states to secede gathered in Montgomery to draft a constitution and elect a president for their new country. This provisional congress met in the Alabama Senate Chambers of the Capital Building in Montgomery, which still stands in the city. Following Fort Sumter, four other states also seceded and the congress was moved to Richmond where it stayed until the end of the war.