other duty required at the moment. Hundreds of the citizens were up all night. A terrible thunder-storm prevailed until a late hour, but in nowise interfered with the ardor of the soldiers.

On the 12th day of April, at half-past four o'clock in the morning, fire was opened upon Fort Sumter. The firing was deliberate, and was continned, without interruption, for twelve hours. The iron battery at Cumming's Point did the most effective service, perceptibly injuring the walls of the fortification, while the floating battery dismounted two of the parapet guns. The shell batteries were served with skill and effect, shells being thrown into the fort every twenty minutes. The fort had replied steadily during the day. About dark, its fire fell off, while ours was continued at intervals during the night. The contest had been watched during the day by excited and anxious citizens from every available point of observation in Charleston-the battery, the shipping in the harbor, and the steeples of churches-and, as night closed, the illuminations of the shells, as they coursed the air, added a strange sublimity to the scene to men who had never before witnessed the fiery splendors of a bombardment. The next morning, at seven o'clock, the fort resumed its fire, doing no damage of consequence. A short while thereafter, the fort was discovered to be on fire, and through the smoke and glare, its flag was discovered at half mast, as a signal of distress. The Federal fleet, which was off the bar, contrary to all expectations, remained quietly where it was; they did not remove from their anchorage or fire a gun. In the mean time, the conflagration, which had seized upon the officers' quarters and barracks at the fort, continued; it no longer responded to our fire, which was kept up with an anxious look-out for tokens of surrender; its garrison, black and begrimed with smoke, were employed in efforts to extinguish the conflagration, and in some instances had to keep themselves lying upon their faces to avoid death from suffocation. During the height of the conflagration, a boat was dispatched by General Beauregard to Major Anderson, with offers of assistance in extinguishing the fire. Before it could reach the fort, the long-expected flag of truce had been hoisted; and the welcome event was instantly announced in every part of the city by the ringing of bells, the pealing

of cannon, the shouts of couriers dashing through the streets, and by every indication of general rejoicing. Major Anderson agreed to an unconditional surrender, as demanded of him; he received of his enemy in return, the most distinguished marks of lenity and consideration: his sword was returned to him by General Beauregard; himself and garrison allowed to take passage, at their convenience, for New York; and, on leaving the fort, he was permitted to salute his flag with fifty guns, the performance of which was attended with the melancholy occurrence of mortal injuries to four of his men by the bursting of two cannon. There was no other life lost in the whole affair.

Thus ended the bombardment of Sumter. It had continued during two days; it was estimated that two thousand shots had been fired in all; a frowning fortification had been reduced to a blackened mass of ruins; and yet not a life had been lost, or a limb injured in the engagement.

The news of the fall of Fort Sumter, when it was received in Washington, did not disturb President Lincoln. He received it with remarkable calmness. The usual drawing-room entertainment at the White House was not intermitted on the evening of the day of the commencement of civil war. The same evening the President turned to a Western Senator and asked, "Will your State sustain me with military power?" He made no other comment on the news, which was agitating every part of the country to its foundation.

The fact was that the President had long ago calculated the result and the effect, on the country, of the hostile movements which he had directed against the sovereignty of South Carolina. He had procured the battle of Sumter; he had no desire or hope to retain the fort: the circumstances of the battle and the non-participation of his fleet in it, were sufficient evidences, to every honest and reflecting mind, that it was not a contest for victory, and that "the sending provisions to a starving garrison" was an ingenious artifice to commence the war that the Federal Government had fully resolved upon, under the specious but shallow appearance of that government being involved by the force of circumstances, rather than by its own volition, in the terrible consequence of civil war.

On the 14th day of April, Mr. Lincoln published his proc

lamation of war. He acted to the last in a sinister spirit. He had just assured the commissioners from Virginia, who had been deputed to ascertain the purposes of his government, that he would modify his inaugural only so far as to "perhaps cause the United States mails to be withdrawn" from the seceded States. The following proclamation was the "modification" of the inaugural:

"Whereas the laws of the United States have been for some time past, and now are, opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding, or by the powers vested in the Marshals by law

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. The details for this object will be immediately communicated to the State authorities through the War Department.

"I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.

"I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth, will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union; and in every event the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation and destruction of, or interference with property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country. And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid, to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.

The trick of the government, to which we have referred, in its procurement of the battle of Sumter, is too dishonest and shallow to account for the immense reaction of sentiment in the North that ensued. That reaction is certainly to be attributed to causes more intelligent and permanent than the weak fallacy that the Lincoln government was not responsible for the hostilities in Charleston harbor, and that the South itself had dragged the government and people of Abraham Lincoln unwillingly into the inauguration of war. The problem of this reaction may be more justly solved. In fact, it involved

no new fact or principle. The Northern people, including all parties, secretly appreciated the value of the Union to themselves; they knew that they would be ruined by a permanent secession of the Southern States; many of them had sought to bring the dissatisfied States back into the Union by the old resource of artful speeches and fine promises; and finding, at last, that the South was in earnest, and was no longer to be seduced by cheap professions, they quickly and sharply determined to coerce what they could not cozen. This is the whole explanation of the wonderful reaction. The North discovered, by the fiery dénouement in Charleston harbor, that the South · was in earnest, and itself became as instantly in earnest. The sudden display of Northern rancor was no reaction; it was no new fact; it revealed what was already historical, and had been concealed only for purposes of policy-the distinct and sharp antipathy between the two sections, of which war or separation, at some time, was bound to be the logical conclusion.

The crusade against the South involved all parties, and united every interest in the North by the common bond of attachment to the Union. That attachment had its own reasons. The idea of the restoration of the Union was conceived in no historical enthusiasm for restoring past glories; it was animated by no patriotic desires contemplating the good of the whole country; the South was to be "whipped back into the Union," to gratify either the selfishness of the North, or its worse lusts of revenge and fanaticism. The holiness of the crusade against the South was preached alike from the hustings and the pulpit. The Northern Democratic party, which had so long professed regard for the rights of the Southern States, and even sympathy with the first movements of their secession, rivalled the Abolitionists in their expressions of fury and revenge; their leaders followed the tide of public opinion: Mr. Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, who some months before had declared in a public speech that if the seceded States were "determined to separate, we had better part in peace," became a rhetorical advocate of the war; Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York, rivalled the Abolition leaders in his State in inflaming the public mind; and in the city of New York, where but a few months before it had been said that the Southern

Confederacy would be able to recruit several regiments for its military service, demagogues in the ranks of the "National Democracy," such as John Cochrane, harangued the multitude, advising them to "crush the rebellion," and, if need be, to drown the whole South in one indiscriminate sea of blood. Old contentions and present animosities were forgotten; Democrats associated with recreants and fanatics in one grand league for one grand purpose; foreigners from Europe were induced into the belief that they were called upon to fight for the "liberty" for which they had crossed the ocean, or for the "free homesteads" which were to be the rewards of the war; and all conceivable and reckless artifices were resorted to to swell the tide of numbers against the South. New England, which had been too conscientious to defend the national honor in the war with Great Britain, poured out almost her whole population to aid in the extermination of a people who had given to the nation all the military glory it had achieved.*

*In the war of 1812, the North furnished 58,552 soldiers; the South, 96,812-making a majority of 37,030 in favor of the South. Of the number furnished by the North

While the little State of South Carolina furnished 5,696.

The whole number of troops contributed by the North to the Mexican war was 23,054; while the South contributed 43,630, very nearly double, and, in proportion to her population, four times as many soldiers as the North.

When a resolution was introduced into the Legislature of Massachusetts, tendering a vote of thinks to the heroic Lawrence for his capture of the Pea cock, that pious State refused to adopt it, and declared

"That in a war like the present, waged without justifiable cause, and prosecuted in a manner indicating that conquest and ambition are its real motives, it is not becoming a moral and religious people to express any approbation of military and naval exploits not directly connected with the defence of our sea coast and our soil."