based upon the delay that this waiting for "an overt act" rendered possible, and his temperate words and carefully considered acts were all shaped to this end. On the fifth of November, Governor Gist sent a message to the legislature of South Carolina urging the assembling of a state convention and the purchase of war material. Here was an act of war, and had Jackson been in Buchanan's seat Gist would have been under arrest within the day. It was well, however, as it was. The convention thus recommended adopted an ordinance of secession December 20. Other states fell into line as follows: Mississippi, January 9, 1861; Florida, January 10; Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; and Texas, February 1. Organization of the seceding states into "The Confederate States of America" was accomplished at Montgomery, Alabama, on the eighth of February.

Before this organization was accomplished the rebels of South Carolina had determined to seize the government works in Charleston harbor, and had proceeded so vigorously to put the plan into execution that Major Anderson, the brave veteran in command, was obliged to abandon Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie, and removed his little force with his stores to Fort Sumter, the only one of the works capable of defense. This occurred December 26, six days after the secession of the state, and from that time the fort was closely and regularly invested. On the ninth of January a vessel carrying supplies for Fort Sumter, and bearing the United States flag, was fired upon by the rebels and driven back to sea. Pensacola navy

yard was soon after seized; General Twiggs, a traitor wearing the uniform of the United States, surrendered all the posts and property of the government in Texas to an armed force of rebels, and many other minor affairs of the same kind occurred.

Floyd, Buchanan's secretary of war, held control of his department until his work of crippling the government and aiding the rebels was done, then resigned and went over to their service. From October, 1860, until the latter date, war existed by the

twelfth of April, 1861, as well as after the act of the south, and no more important campaign was fought in all that bloody war than that by which Lincoln, one unarmed and powerless citizen, stayed the tide of important events until it could be possible to meet force with force.

When he assumed office he found an organized and armed rebellion in all the cotton states, and the border states wavering and ready to secede at any moment. He found only the ghost of an army, from which the ablest officers educated by the government had gone and were daily going to join the rebellion. He found dismantled forts and empty arsenals, a depleted treasury, a demoralized and largely destroyed civil service, and no navy. The north had been stripped, by theft or purchase, of nearly all its arms, public and private, and with these in hand, armies had been forming

and drilling for months, and were ready and eager for active service, and supported by perfect unity and confidence.

Against such an enemy and with such utter lack of means, Lincoln was called upon to cope, while behind him were not only the open enmity of the well-named "Copperheads" to be faced, but doubt, timidity and selfinterest among the well-affected to be overcome, before all could be welded into a compact and aggressive sentiment, indispensable to success. While the match was burning in the magazine and an explosion might come at any moment, three great points must be made, and these required the greatest care. The north must be united; the border states must be held neutral, and a sufficient war establishment created from nothing and placed in the field. Premature action at any time, a hasty word, or an apparent disposition to resent the repeated insults to the flag, would have lost to the Union not only Virginia and Tennessee, but Maryland, Delaware, what is now West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, the control of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, incidentally, Kansas and Nebraska, and would have transferred the military frontier, from the Potomac and the Ohio, to free soil. Thus was Lincoln compelled to abide in silence, while impatient friends who wanted the rebellion crushed, and never questioned of the means, fretted and fumed, and enemies exulted and scoffed. His silence and final success were a great moral as well as political triumph.

Another matter was never absent from Lincoln's mind from first to last; that the southern states were not in rebellion, and the southern people were not to be regarded as enemies; that certain communities were temporarily dominated by seditious individuals, and that the normal relations between the seceded states and the general government were thereby interrupted. There never was a moment when South Carolina or Alabama might not have resumed its place in the Union, so far as the government was concerned, and the work of reconstructing the political edifice did in fact go on as, little by little, alienated sections were redeemed, side by side with the movements of armies and within sound of the guns of battle. In all political history, so grand a view of civil uprising was never taken elsewhere. It was not only just to loyal communities, but it was logical and essential to the position of the north, as any recognition of the existence of a belligerent state would have given excuse for the intervention which European governments were all too eager to make. The mistake of departing from this true principle and true policy was never made. The conservative, thoughtful and far-seeing policy of Mr. Lincoln was adhered to from first to last, in the face not only of the insane demands of popular extremists, but of the advice of prominent men from whom better things might have been expected, and whose counsels, if followed, would have brought the country to certain ruin. His calm persistence, through evil and through good report, in pursuing the course which he believed wise

and just, stands out before almost any other quality of Mr. Lincoln's great character, for, truly,

"It is harder, far, to suffer than to do."

No public man was ever so misunderstood and maligned, and none ever received a vindication so complete from the logic of events.

As has been said, the President's cabinet was substantially settled when he took his seat. It consisted of William H. Seward of New York, secretary of state; Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, secretary of war; Gideon Wells of Connecticut, secretary of the navy; Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, secretary of the treasury; Caleb B. Smith of Indiana, secretary of the interior; Edward Bates of Missouri, attorney-general, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland, postmaster-general.

Washington was a curious social study in those days. It was very nearly as disloyal as Richmond and Baltimore, until it had been well swept and garnished. The departments were full of ardent friends of the secession movement, until these were one by one displaced or dropped their pens to take up muskets in the southern armies. Society, in the narrow sense of the word, was intensely and bitterly rebellious, and probably now here in any southern state would the expression of sympathy with the cause of freedom have resulted in so complete an exclusion from the inner circles of fashion. The ladies-those fair evangels of blood and rebellion-strummed "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and "My Maryland," day and night, before their open windows, and, in the security of weakness, flaunted their disloyalty upon the open streets.

When it was sought to bring the militia of the District of Columbia into a condition of decent efficiency for home defence, but one company -the National rifles-was found available, and it was not until this had gone through a process of depletion, by desertions to the south, and its ranks had been filled by loyal department clerks from the north, that it could be entrusted with any serious service.

Congress having rejected those puny and dangerous resorts. the Peace congress and the Crittenden Compromise, adjourned; the President was inaugurated and his cabinet officers assumed their places. What was next to come? For the answer to this question the loyal and disloyal sections alike waited with breathless interest. Lincoln, having shifted all possible detail upon the various departments, but always holding in his own hands the final authority, prepared to take the answer from the hands of fate. John G. Nicoloy was the President's private secretary, and, no provision existing for increasing the executive force, as was absolutely necessary, John Hay and W. O. Stoddard were appointed to department clerkships and detailed to serve as assistants.

On the twelfth of March there arrived at Washington a most extraordinary embassy, consisting of Messrs Roman of Louisiana, Forsyth of

Alabama and Crawford of Georgia, charged with the very remarkable duty of attempting to open diplomatic relations between the so-called Confederate states and the government of the United States. Of course this involved a demand for the surrender to the Confederacy of all the authority it claimed and had usurped. Had such a mad mission been undertaken to any other government in the world, its ambassadors would have been seized and probably hanged for treason; and Mr. Lincoln was at the time very generally condemned for not taking such a course. We can now see how much better it was to allow the agents of this stupid plan to sneak back to those who sent them, bearing the burthen of their ignominious failure.

On the sixth of March the Confederate government made its first call for troops which the various seceded states were holding in armed and equipped readiness. The north was also rousing itself, and the question of organizing and officering, uniforming, equipping and sustaining its future armies was most pressing. The Norfolk navy yard was abandoned and destroyed, because one loyal officer could not hold it against false subordinates and would not allow it to fall into rebel control.

On April 8 a messenger of the government gave notice to Governor Pickens of South Carolina, of an intention to provision Fort Sumter, making the conciliatory addition to his statement, that if this were not resisted, no effort would be made to throw in provisions, arms or ammunition without previous notice, except in the case of an attack. There was discussion upon the subject, which the rebel authorities cut short by declaring that the announcement of intent to save a garrison of the United States from starvation, was a declaration of war. It has been well said that, but for the ghastly consequences, this would seem like a grim joke. Up to this time Sumter had been invested, but not assailed. At half-past four o'clock, on the morning of April 12, the first gun was fired at the fort, and, thirty hours later, Major Anderson, its brave old commander, was obliged to strike his flag, and surrender the fort and its weary and halfstarved little garrison of seventy men.

Here at last was war in act as well as in implication. It aroused the wildest enthusiasm in the south and the profoundest anger in the north. It gave the Confederacy in a few days North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas, but it united the President's hands, gave the north a great and definite wrong to redress, and, by hastening military preparations, saved Maryland, Kentucky and what is now West Virginia.

The news of the fall of Sumter came to Washington on Sunday, April 14, though notice of the bombardment had come a day earlier. The cabinet was in session, and the President, who had held and reprovisioned Sumter against the advice of his ministers, was now prepared to show the logic of his acts and his superiority to those about him by promptly disre