Campfire and Battlefield / An Illustrated History of the Campaigns and Conflicts of the Great Civil War

by Rossiter Johnson; Selden Connor; John Brown Gordon; Henry W. B. Howard; O. O. Howard; John Tyler Morgan; John Clark Ridpath

PRELIMINARY EVENTS.

CAUSES OF THE WAR—SLAVERY, STATE RIGHTS, SECTIONAL FEELING—JOHN BROWN—ELECTION OF LINCOLN—SECESSION OF SOUTHERN STATES—"SHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT"—PENSACOLA—MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON—SUMTER OCCUPIED—THE "STAR OF THE WEST"—SUMTER BOMBARDED AND EVACUATED—THE CALL TO ARMS.

On the 9th of January, 1861, the Star of the West, a vessel which the United States Government had sent to convey supplies to Fort Sumter, was fired on by batteries on Morris Island, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and was compelled to withdraw.

RIVER GUNBOAT (A CONVERTED NEW YORK FERRYBOAT).

The bombardment of Fort Sumter began on April 12th, the fort was surrendered on the 13th and evacuated on the 14th. On April 19th the Sixth Massachusetts regiment, which had been summoned to the defence of the national capital, was attacked, en route, in the streets of Baltimore.

Meanwhile, several Southern States had passed ordinances seceding from the Union, and had formed a new union called the Confederate States of America. Many Government forts, arsenals, and navy yards had been seized by the new Confederacy; and by midsummer a bloody civil war was in progress, which for four years absorbed the energies of the whole American people.

What were the causes of this civil war?

The underlying, fundamental cause was African slavery—the determination of the South to perpetuate and extend it, and the determination of the people of the North to limit or abolish it. Originally existing in all the colonies, slavery had been gradually abolished in the Northern States, and was excluded from the new States that came into the Union from the Northwestern Territory. The unprofitableness of slave labor might, in time, have resulted in its abolition in the South; but the invention, at the close of the last century, of Eli Whitney's cotton-gin, transformed the raising of cotton from an almost profitless to the most profitable of the staple industries, and as a result of it the American plantations produced seven-eighths of all the cotton of the world. African labor was necessary to it, and the system of slavery became a fixed and deep-rooted system in the South.

PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET.