The cotton-gin struck, in 1793, springs all over the slave States, whose multiplying flows so gathered head in 1821 as to require damming back. The Missouri dike was erected. The pent waters, however, were found so profitable for foreign mill-owners, for over-shot feeders to Northern shelves, for commercial pockets, and political ballot-boxes, as well as such wealth-distributing streams over the growing breadths and easy luxuries of their Southern owners, that expedients were devised to swell their volume, area, and back-water power. The dike, cut in 1854, let out the accumulated deluge into new sluice-ways, which promised to some increased profits, but which produced great ravages in many ways, and at last set towards maelstroms, down whose gurgling throats were sucked, not only the passive and floating citizen, and the compromising, timid politician, but much of the life and wealth of the nation at large.

Over the angry ridges, rapidly rising on the 4th of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln, uneasy at the white caps crisping the dark swells, and himself in disguise, landed at the national wharf in Washington. Without disguise, however, he at once, in a distinct, calm voice, announced the principles upon which he proposed to meet the menacing flood, namely, not to interfere with its black tides in States where they were legally channelled, nor to create any new courses in Territories in which they had not surged, and steadily to enforce, in spite of all obstructions, the existing rules, regulations, and laws both North and South.

Cotton Supreme.
(p. 483)

This announcement struck the knob of the national shield, and its metallic notes quivered through the air. The three commissioners, despatched from the somehow gathered Confederate assemblage at Montgomery, heard the vibrations the morning of their arrival, March 5th, but failed to shout loud enough to be heard themselves, and returned speedily with their cross-barred message.

Attention was immediately directed to the ravelled American stocking rapidly running down. The blue yarn of the navy was taken up stitch by stitch. The threads of the little army were picked up, lying loosely around at a distance from the capital, and, by much knotting and splicing, were put upon the old, rusty, war-needles for work. It was very sad business for the gentle-minded Lincoln, although helped by Mr. Seward in the State Department,—a very vigorous and manifold letter-writer,—by the wide-headed Chase in the Treasury, by the strong-knuckled Cameron in the noisy War Bureau, and by that long-bearded Gideon Welles, whose unthatched upper story became in time, like a naval depot, the receptacle of a great deal of odd material, most of it too old to be serviceable. In truth, with his funny ways, dropping anchor when he should be making steam, bothered with new inventions, gun bores and spiral devices, which he had never seen at Hartford, and quite incomprehensible often by any one, puzzled by stern duties and running about to know where the ship’s waste was, the latter old gentleman was about the only joke which went about for four years.

Notice by the government of its intention to add to the eighty men in Fort Sumter drew upon that little stone pentagon a lively cannonade of thirty-six hours, by General Beauregard, the Confederate military leader, distorting its resolute visage, and causing wry faces everywhere throughout the North, and very many among the strikers at the South.

The first whizzing shot was the first uneasy spasm in that horrible nightmare which crept over America and held it bound for four years.

For the sake of human nature; for the sake of our common past, and our now dawning brighter future, we would fain draw over the face of the disturbed sleeper a veil, which should but dimly delineate, if it did not altogether hide from view, the uncoffined ghastliness. The purposes of history, however, forbid us, nurses as we are in trouble, as boon companions in feasting, to quit the room; and so holding still, as best we can, the hand of genial Humor, we sit down amid the uncomic scenes of a fratricidal struggle.

Through the evening silences which followed the evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861, were heard at Montgomery and in other Confederate cities rhetorical voices of gratulation at the humbled pride, flag, and prosperity of the North, and predictions of bold equestrian sallies into Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; at the North, wails of sorrow, sudden questions of the causeless blows on the tingling national cheek, mixed with remorseful self-accusations at the weak petting, which had so encouraged unrestrained tempers as to invite to this public breaking of the family crockery and this unconcealable family disgrace. “Had not the rod been so long spared,”—was the general feeling,—“we should now be spared the use of the ramrod.” The next morning, however, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the need of seventy-five thousand ramrods, with good men to accompany them to Washington. At the same time he asked the wise men to meet at the capital in July for consultation. Ere the next daybreak, a thousand Massachusetts lads were on their way towards the Potomac, shining in new-burnished steel and new polished love for that old Union mother, whose goodness had been so steady and uniform as hitherto to excite no manifested return. On the 19th of April they reached Baltimore, and were passing through in the horse-cars, when they were set upon by a bad lot of hards and softs of that city,—as others before and since have frequently been assailed in their transit, by railway and hotel runners. Other regiments soon followed from “the teeming North, through all her unfrozen loins.” Guns were got down from rusted hooks; shoulder-straps straightened; blunderbusses and other busses given and taken; officers beaten up from behind ploughshares to be beaten in first skirmishes into good leaders; and shields from all the free States were clasped around the waist of the capital. Never were there so many gun-holders, nor so few office-seekers, at Washington in the month of April.