Whatever had been the original design of the story, its instant effect, in the excited state of the public mind, was the formation of companies in every county and village throughout the South for military drill.
These organizations, of which there were frequently several in a single village, were equipped entirely at the expense of the individual members. As they were under constant drill during the winter and summer, they presented at the opening of the year 1861 the singular spectacle of a great army, organized and equipped at its own expense, ready at any moment to march at the command of the recognized government. This, it is unnecessary to say, was the grand basis of that army which was afterward placed upon the field; and thus it was that a secretary of war so palpably inefficient as Mr. Walker was able, with an empty treasury, for many months to surpass the North in the supply of troops, equipped, and at once prepared for duty.
It was in full appreciation of this great armed mass that lay at his hand in a condition to be easily formed into an organized and efficient army, that Mr. Davis, after much entreaty, and repeated postponement, reluctantly gave his assent to the first strong act of the executive department, and ordered the attack upon Fort Sumter.
Without anticipating what were to be the effects of this act in the North, which was, indeed, open to the conjecture of no man, Mr. Davis on this occasion simply exhibited a hesitancy in venturing on extreme measures, which will be found to be a characteristic feature of his administration.
For several days the city was filled with rumors concerning the anticipated attack, but early on Friday morning it was announced that the bombardment had already begun. In the general excitement, business was suspended. Crowds filled the streets. The war department was in constant receipt of telegraphic messages announcing the progress of the bombardment. But nothing came during the day to diminish the growing anxiety. It was found that the fleet of war vessels said to be outside the bar would take advantage of the night to come to the succor of the fort. Sleep was impossible. Men who had gone to bed arose again and joined the crowd which thronged the streets. At length, shortly after midnight, Mr. Walker came forth and announced the last and most favorable telegraphic report concerning the progress of the siege, uttering at the same time the famous boast which has linked his name with an indissoluble association of folly. Shortly past noon on Saturday, the message came which announced the surrender of the fort. The city was frantic with joy. For hours, no forms of manifestation seemed adequate to express the excitement which filled all classes of society. Standing on the housetop in the evening, a wild crowd could be seen flitting before bonfires, or ranging the streets, and shouting in the ecstasy of an excitement which none could control. Immediately on the arrival of the despatch, messengers had started into the country with the welcome tidings, and deep in the night the ear was startled by the dull roar of the cannon announcing the arrival in some distant village of the joyful intelligence.
'That will be the end of the war,' said a man of well known conservatism, who stood by at the announcement in Montgomery of the surrender of the fort. It was the last expression of that fatal fallacy which had lured so large a class quietly to acquiesce in the fact of secession in the hope of thus securing the peaceful recognition of the North. In a few days more, the whole deception had passed away. But the correction had come too late. The Union party was extinct. Twice, in the course of that great change, by the progress of which, a people, in majority loyal, was converted into one totally disloyal and revolutionary, it lay within the power of the Federal Executive, by firmness and a proper exhibition of its powers, to have sustained the Union party in the South and crushed the rebellion—before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and at the time of the strong Union reaction in the election of delegates to the State convention. At both these periods the Union feeling was strong and increasing, immediately after each; pressed upon by arguments which the course of the Executive had failed to answer, it slowly declined. But no great sentiment is destroyed at once. There is reason to believe that, if left to itself, the tide of Union feeling might again have flowed back, and the faint traces of a reconstruction party which appeared in the short interval of quiet that belonged to the rebel confederacy indicates, perhaps, the path along which it would have returned. But the time for these things had passed.
The fall of Sumter brought the doctrines of secession into instant popularity, and roused a spirit of military enthusiasm in the South scarcely less intense than that which the same event excited in the North. At once, in every direction, disappeared all those sober scruples which, during the hottest excitement of the preceding months, had quietly controlled the judgment of a small but influential class in every community. The change in north Alabama and central Tennessee, where the principles of secession had been steadily rejected by the people, was almost instantaneous. The excitement and pride of a sectional victory, and a false sympathy for the individuals who had ventured their lives in a cause in itself, perhaps, objectionable, effected what the most cunning fallacies of the leaders had been unable to accomplish. As this movement of the popular feeling had many points of resemblance with the revolution of feeling which took place just after the election of Mr. Lincoln, there were some who believed that it would be followed by a similar reaction. The excitement of the war into which the whole country was immediately precipitated, cut off, however, every chance of any such retrogressive movement. No reaction took place. The surrender of Fort Sumter completed the change of opinion which had been so long progressing in the South.
Those who look for an immediate restitution of Union feeling in the South, as a result of Federal victories, will be disappointed. It will be the result of a gradual movement—a movement resembling in every important particular that by which the secession sentiment was established in the interval between the election of Mr. Lincoln and the surrender of Fort Sumter. Operating particularly upon that class in society which is by nature passive rather than active, conservative rather than headlong, the movement, as in that case, will be at first slow and attended with many reactions, but the result will not be uncertain. Already the progress of the war has destroyed nearly all the motives by which the Union party of the South was formerly led to adopt the cause of secession. This great party, therefore, stretching through all parts of the South, forming an important element in the population of every village and county which threatened at one time with its passive resistance to overturn the whole scheme of the rebellion, stands now exposed to the full influence of the reactionary tide which has now begun to set back toward the Union. The change may not be at once, but the same motive which led the Union man of Tennessee to return to loyalty, will prove equally effective with his whole party, wherever distributed.