Independence had been reverently addressed as an act of "decent respect."

So for forty days or so after Mr. Lincoln assumed office there was nothing done, except in the way of preparation for emergencies. In the meanwhile Virginia still held aloof from the secession movement and five other border states-the chief sources of that military strength which resides in a food supplywere waiting for the word from the mother state.

It began to be understood in South Carolina that something must be done to compel Virginia to take her stand one way or the other. There was little if any doubt that upon the abstract right of any state to secede, Virginia stood firmly with the South. But her protest was resolute against the contention that secession was at that time either necessary or politic. It was necessary, therefore, to "force Virginia's hand," as whist players say, to do something which might leave to that state no choice but that between secession on her own part and consent, on the other hand, to the doctrine that the National Government was possessed of a right to coerce, and by military force to subdue, states that had assumed to act upon what they claimed to be and what Virginia freely recognized as the right of each state to withdraw from the Union at its own good pleasure. It was plain that the war must be hurried into being if the new Confederacy, composed exclusively of the cotton states, was to ally Virginia and the other food-producing states of the South with itself and thus secure any hope or even any chance of success in its effort to maintain itself.

Accordingly General Beauregard, who was in command at Charleston, was ordered to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter, and upon refusal to reduce that work. This was a ridiculously easy task. But its execution was a thing of momentous consequence.

Major Anderson, who commanded the fort with its mere handful of men, was himself a man of Southern extraction, as were Farragut, George H. Thomas, Winfield Scott and even Lincoln himself. But Anderson was a soldier in the United States Army and while he freely declared that his heart was not in a war against the South, he had no thought of failing in his soldierly duty.

When on the eleventh of April, 1861, he was summoned to surrender, he refused, as it became a brave officer to do. He knew perfectly well that Beauregard had force enough and cannon enough and ammunition enough to reduce a dozen such forts as that which he commanded, but in that spirit which throughout the war animated every good soldier of whatever rank in both armies, he refused to yield until such time as physical force should overcome his powers of resistance and compel his surrender. There was a relieving fleet in the offing, but, though it drew near enough during the action for Major Anderson to salute it, it rendered him no assistance and indeed made no attempt to do so.

Beauregard opened fire upon the fort at 4:20 A.M. on the twelfth of April, from batteries located at every available range point. The unfitness of the antiquated masonry work to endure a bombardment was quickly and, to Major Anderson, disastrously

demonstrated, but in spite of all he heroically held out until on the next day his men were literally driven from their guns by the smoke of the burning quarters within the fortification. Unable to make further resistance and obviously hopeless of assistance even from that fleet in the offing which had been elaborately equipped and sent to effect his reinforcement and rescue, he at last capitulated.

He was permitted to salute his flag before lowering it, to march his command out of the fort with military honors, and to sail North with his men.

Those were the mild-mannered, courteous, drawing-room days of war. The butchery and brutality were to come later. Nobody had been killed by the fire of either side, and nobody wounded. The courtesy which had marked all relations between Major Anderson and the Carolinians was maintained to the end. Major Anderson left Charleston as any honored guest might have left a hospitable mansion in Charleston Neck after entertainment, with the good wishes, the friendship, and the godspeed of his hosts. Nothing could have been pleasanter or more exquisitely courteous than this encounter and this parting. But it was the preface to a war which sent brave men by scores of thousands to their graves, desolated thousands of homes, North and South, made widows of loving wives and orphans of unoffending children.

So far as the direct effect of the spectacular but bloodless bombardment of Fort Sumter was concerned it failed of its purpose. Even such an event did not prompt the Virginia convention, as had been hoped and confidently anticipated, to adopt an ordi

nance of secession. On the day after news of it was received in Richmond the representatives of the mother state stood as resolutely as ever in opposition to a secession program, which they deemed at once impolitic and unjustified by anything in the situation of affairs.

But the bombardment accomplished its intended effect by indirection. It gave Mr. Lincoln occasion to call for a volunteer army with which to meet what had thus assumed the character of a war upon the United States. As has been already related he called for seventy-five thousand men and demanded of Virginia that she should furnish her proportional part of that force. After many weeks of resolute resistance to what the Virginians regarded as a policy of quixotic folly and certain destruction, the Virginia convention on the seventeenth of April, 1861, adopted an ordinance of secession. From that hour war was on in earnest, as both sides quite clearly understood.

CHAPTER XII

THE ATTITUDE OF THE BORDER STATES

With the secession of Virginia on the seventeenth of April, 1861, there came a final end to all hope of finding a way out. The active border states did not immediately declare their secession indeed, but that was a foregone conclusion so far as Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were concerned, and military proceedings did not wait for the formal act. That came on the sixth of May, in Arkansas, on the twentieth of May in North Carolina, and on the eighth of June in Tennessee. Kentucky and Missouri were so divided in sentiment that no united action for or against the Union could be secured.

Kentucky officially assumed an attitude of neutrality to which neither side paid the smallest attention then or later. That indeed was the most impossible of all conceivable attitudes. It assumed to the state all the independent right of action that secession itself implied, without asserting a claim to the right of secession. It proclaimed Kentucky to be so far out of the Union as to demand respect for its neutrality and so far in the Union as to exercise its full voice in Congress. It warned the armies of both sides to avoid trespass upon Kentucky's territory, a warning which, if Kentucky had undertaken to enforce, it would have involved that state in immediate