college. But his election was almost purely geographical. The South had sustained a defeat, not at the hands of a party, but at those of the Northern power. Every Northern State but New Jersey had voted for Mr. Lincoln; every Southern State had voted against him. He was not known as a statesman, whose name might therefore be one of national significance; he was known only as a partisan, and the election of such a man in such a character was plainly to declare war against the other side. In the face of this sectional triumph there was plainly no protection for the South in the future. There was none in power; for the superiour political strength of the North was now beyond dispute. There was none in public opinion; for that, all the political history of America showed, was the slave of the majority. There was none in the courts; for the Dred Scott decision had been denounced in the Chicago platform as a dangerous heresy, and the doctrine upon which Mr. Lincoln had been elected had been actually declared illegal by the supreme judicial authority of the country. In Congress the Northern States had 183 votes; the South, if unanimous, 120. If then the North was prepared to act in a mass its power was irresistible; and the election of Mr. Lincoln plainly showed that it was prepared so to act and to carry out a sectional design. The antislavery power in the North was now compact and invincible. A party opposed to slavery had organized in 1840, with about seven thousand voters; in 1860, it had polled nearly two million votes, and had succeeded in electing the President of the United States. The conservative party in the North had been thoroughly corrupted. They were beaten in every Northern State in 1860, with a single exception, by the avowed enemies of the South, who, but a few years ago, had been powerless in their midst. The leaders of the Northern Democratic party had, in 1856 and in 1860, openly taken the position that freedom would be more certainly secured in the Territories by the rule of non-intervention than by any other policy or expedient. This interpretation of their policy alone saved the Democratic party from entire annihilation. The overwhelming pressure of the anti-slavery sentiment had prevented their acceding to the Southern platform in the Presidential canvass. Nothing in the present or in the future could be looked for from the so-called conservatives of the North; and the South prepared to go out of a Union which no longer afforded any guaranty for her rights or any permanent sense of security, and which had brought her under the domination of a section, the designs of which, carried into legislation, would destroy her institutions, and even involve the lives of her people. Such was the true and overwhelming significance of Mr. Lincoln's election to the people of the South. They saw in it the era of a sectional domination, which they proposed to encounter, not by revolution, properly THE LOGICAL NECESSITY OF DISUNION. 81 so called, not by an attempt to recover by arms their constitutional rights in the Union, but simply to escape by withdrawal from the confederation, and the resumption of their original character of independent States. But again it was urged by the apologists of Mr. Lincoln's election that such escape of the South from its results was unfair, in view of the fact that during most of the preceding period of the Union, the South had held in its hands the administration at Washington, and had but little reason now to complain that it had passed to those of the rival section. This view was not without plausibility, and yet as fallacious as that which appealed to the prescriptive rule of majorities in America. The South had held political power at Washington for a long time; but that power threatened nothing in the North, sought nothing from it, desired to disturb nothing in it. It had no aggressive intent: it stood constantly on the defensive. It had no sectional history: it was associated with a general prosperity of the country. "Do not forget," said Senator Hammond of South Carolina, when Mr. Seward boasted in the United States Senate that the North was about to take control at Washington,-" it can never be forgotten-it is written on the brightest page of human history— that we, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, and, after ruling her for sixty out of seventy years of her existence, we shall surrender her to you without a stain upon her honour, boundless in prosperity, incalculable in her strength, the wonder and the admiration of the world. Time will show what you will make of her; but no time can ever diminish our glory or your responsibility." When the South held power, it was only to the North a certain absence from office, a certain exclusion from patronage. But when the North was to obtain it, acting not as a party, but a people united on a geographical idea, it was something more than a negative evil or disappointment to the South; it was the enthronement at Washington of a sectional despotism that threatened the institutions, the property, and the lives of the people of the Southern States. Power in the hands of the South affected the patronage of a political party in the North. Power in the hands of the North affected the safety and happiness of every individual in the South.-It was simply determined by the South to withdraw from a game where the stakes were so unequal, and where her loss would have been ruin. 6 CHAPTER V. PREPARATIONS OF SOUTH CAROLINA TO WITHDRAW FROM THE UNION.-PASSAGE OF HER THE telegraph had no sooner announced the election of Abraham Lincoln President of the United States than the State of South Carolina prepared for a deliberate withdrawal from the Union. Considering the argu SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 83 ment as fully exhausted, she determined to resume the exercise of her rights as a sovereign State; and for this purpose her Legislature called a Convention. It assembled in Columbia on the 17th of December, 1860. Its sessions were held in a church, over which floated a flag bearing the device of a palmetto tree, with an open Bible at its trunk, with the inscription: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble, therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the sea; the Lord of Hosts is with us-the God of Jacob is our refuge.' On the 18th the Convention adjourned to Charleston, and on the 20th of December passed the memorable ordinance of Secession, concluding that "the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America' is hereby dissolved." The ordinance was passed by a unanimous vote. A ceremony was appointed for the signing in public of the roll of parchment on which the ordinance was engrossed. The public procession entered St. Andrew's Hall in order the President and members of the Convention coming first, followed by the President and members of the Senate, and the Speaker and House of Representatives. Their entry was greeted by loud and prolonged cheers from the spectators; the proceedings were commenced with prayer; the Attorney-General of the State then announced that the ordinance had been engrossed by order of the Convention, and the parchment roll was signed by the members who were called successively to the table. When all had signed, the parchment was raised in the sight of the assemblage, and when the President announced the State of South Carolina an Independent Commonwealth, the whole audience rose to their feet, and with enthusiastic cheers testified their sense of the thrilling proclamation. A few days after this event a memorable event occurred in Charleston harbour. On the 26th of December Major Anderson, who was in command of the Federal forces there, evacuated Fort Moultrie, spiking the guns and burning the gun carriages, and occupied Fort Sumter with a view of strengthening his position. This movement was effected as a surprise under cover of night. The place in which Major Anderson had now taken refuge was pronounced by military critics to be well-nigh impregnable. Fort Sumter was a small work; but as strong as could well be conceived. It was a modern truncated pentagonal fort, rising abruptly out of the water at the mouth of Charleston harbour, three and a half miles from the city. The foundation was an artificial one, made of chips of granite firmly imbedded in the mud and sand, and so well constructed that it had cost half a million of dollars, and consumed ten years of labour. When Major Anderson occupied the fortification, it was so nearly completed as to admit the introduction of its armament. The walls were of solid brick and concrete masonry, sixty feet high, and from eight to twelve feet in thickness, and pierced for three tiers of guns on the northern, eastern, and western sides. These guns commanded the harbour, thus giving the Federal garrison the power to arrest the shipping bound to and from the port, and to assume an attitude of hostility inconsistent with the safety of that part of the State of South Carolina. In the mean time the event of South Carolina's formal withdrawal from the Union was treated by the North generally with derision. Northern newspapers scoffed at her; Northern pictorials abounded with caricatures of Palmetto chivalry; secession cockades, it was said, would soon pass out of fashion, and, on the appearance of the first United States regiment in Charleston harbour, would be found as scarce as cherries in the snow. But what was most remarkable in the treatment of the event by the Northern newspapers and politicians was, that they all united in affecting the most entire and ready willingness that South Carolina, and as many Slave States as chose to accompany her should go out of the Union whenever they pleased. This affectation, which was half insolence and half hypocrisy, was heard everywhere in the North. As long, indeed, as the North apprehended no serious consequences, and from its very vanity refused to entertain the idea that the South had any means or resources for making a serious resistance to the Federal authority, it easily afforded to ridicule the movement of South Carolina; to compare her to a "spoilt child," wandering from the fold of a "paternal government; " and to declare that there was really no design to coerce her or her sister States, but rather pleasure at the separation. "Let the prodigal go," exclaimed one of the political preachers of the North. A God-speed was added by Mr. Greeley, of the New York Tribune. And yet a few months later, and these men and their followers were in agonies of anxiety and paroxysms of fury to reclaim what they then called the "rebel " States, declaring that their cities should be laid in ashes, and their soil sown with blood; while the benevolent Tribune drew from its imagination and hopes a picture, not of the returned prodigal, but of punished "rebels" returning home to find their wives and children cowering in rags, and Famine sitting at the fireside.* * (From the New York Tribune of Nov. 26, and Dec. 17, 1860.) "We hold with Jefferson to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious, and if the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless, and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent. Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets. If ever seven or eight States send agents to Washington to say, 'We want to go out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty, to say, 'Let them go!' And we do not see how we could take the other side, without coming in |