Late one December day in 1860, a Southern gentleman hastened to the White House. On the steps he met an old friend who had just left Buchanan. Waving his hat, he shouted, "This is a glorious day! South Carolina has seceded!" That night an impromptu banquet was held in Washington, at which the Southern leaders drank to the success of the slave empire that was to be founded, and talked about a Southern army, a Southern navy, the annexation of Mexico and the West India Islands. Then swiftly followed the secession of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida.
Almost every week during the winter of 1861 witnessed the spectacle of Southern Senators and Representatives saying good-bye to Congress and announcing the withdrawal of their State from the Union. Those were days of thick darkness at Washington. Gloom fell upon the North. Already the shadow of the great eclipse was stealing across the face of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed as if the government, "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal," was about to "perish from the earth." Hamilton had called the Republic "the last, best hope of earth." Burke had characterized the Constitution "an event as wonderful as if a new star had arisen on the horizon to shine as bright as the planets." Now the star was to fall out of the sky! Up to the day of his inauguration Lincoln could not believe the South would ever fire on the flag, or take up arms against the Union. "We are friends, and not enemies—we must not be enemies." But it was not to be as Lincoln wished. There are some diseases so terrible that they must be cured by the knife and the cautery. Slavery had fastened on the very vitals of the South. Therefore, God permitted the surgery of war.
Lincoln's inaugural address on March 4, 1861, caused a certain solemn hush to fall upon the land. Its logic, the facts it contained, the principles it presented, were so convincing for the intellect and yet so suffused with pathos and beauty and majesty, that the people, North and South alike, stood uncertain and expectant.
But the silence was premonitory. In summer, after a hot, sultry day, when the great city has exhaled poisonous gases, the clouds are piled mountain high on the horizon. Then a hush comes. Not a leaf stirs. It is hard to breathe. Suddenly one bolt leaps from the east to the west—the precursor of ten thousand fiery darts that are to burn the poison away, and of the heavy rains and winds that will wash the air and make it sweet and clean. On the 12th of April the silence for the nation was broken by the shot fired at Fort Sumter. The bomb that went shrieking through the air was the precursor of a million men in arms, the most frightful carnage, the most terrible war in history, when brother took up arms against brother, and the whole land became one vast cemetery.
It is often said that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and began an aggressive war to destroy the Union, before the South was ready. Probably the fact in the case is that South Carolina was trying to "fire the Southern heart," and force the State of Virginia into the secession movement. The Old Dominion State was naturally a Union State. It was a Virginian who uttered the most impassioned words in the history of liberty—Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. It was a Virginian who led the colonial armies to victory—Washington. It was a Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson. He too, a Virginian governor, made the great protest to King George against the further imposition of slavery by force of arms. He too, a Virginian, the founder of Washington and Jefferson College, had called upon the men of the Dominion State to rise up and destroy the curse of slavery. But from the moment when that shell rose through the pathless air, curved slightly and burst above Sumter, the die was cast. Five days later, Virginia passed her ordinance of secession.
Oh, if the veil could have been lifted from Beauregard's eyes when he began that bombardment! If he could but have seen the riches become poverty, cities become a waste, happy homes a desolation, the Southern hillsides covered with graves, the Southern plantations grown up with weeds, and the whole secession movement futile, what a vision would have fallen upon the soldier!
On the 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, the students of law and medicine and theology closed their books, the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the woodsman dropped his ax, the carpenter his hammer, and the young men of twenty-three States sprang to arms. What astonished the South most of all was the attitude of Douglas, and the Northern Democrats, who had been confidently counted upon to stand by secession. One Southern fire-eater had said that "Douglas and the Democrats will fight Lincoln and the Republicans, and it will be another case of the Kilkenny cats, leaving the South in peace to build up a great empire." But the first thing that Stephen A. Douglas did was to go to the White House and pledge his support to Lincoln, as did the leading Democrats of the North. "The attack upon Sumter," said Douglas, "leaves us but two parties—patriots and traitors." And now the war was on,—the one side fighting for the Federal Union and liberty for all men, and the other side fighting for State sovereignty and slavery.
These great events bring us front to front with the question as to how Southern men justified their firing upon the old flag and attacking the Union. Let us confess that men do not make martyrs of themselves unless they have a cause that commands the intellect and conquers the will.
Skeptics used to say that the apostles invented the character of Jesus. As if men first of all invent a lie and inflate a bubble myth, and then go out in support of it to get themselves mobbed, kicked through the streets, thrown from windows, tortured on the rack, crucified and burned alive after incredible heroism for thirty years! To say that the disciples invented the story of Jesus and then martyred themselves for their falsehood is as intellectually stupid and silly as it is morally monstrous! Not otherwise these leading men of the South were men of the loftiest character, of great personal worth, patriotic, high-minded, and they did not devastate their land and martyr themselves for idle abstractions. Here is John C. Calhoun, ranked by all as one of the triumvirate—Webster, Calhoun and Clay. Here is Gen. Robert E. Lee, of whom Lord Wolsey said that for one State to have given birth to two such men as Washington and Lee was to have lent it immortal renown. Lincoln and Grant and our Northern generals understood the Southern men, sympathized with them, and therefore because the intellect grasped their position, Grant's heart forgave Lee, and made the two friends. To understand this, go to-day to a great battle-field of that conflict and hear the Northern generals and the Southern generals rehearse the story of the Civil War, and you will understand the magnanimity of the Northern leader and the argument of the Southern soldier. History has destroyed the old delusion that secession was a conspiracy, organized by a few malignant leaders. All historians to-day, Northern and Southern alike, concede that it was a great popular uprising of the Southern people.
Indeed, it was not altogether a contest between Northern blood on the one side, and Southern blood on the other.