STATUS OF THE SLAVE.

ters, and found very little favor among the non-slaveholding whites of the South. All classes of whites were wedded to the system, and could see only good in it. This was but the natural result of the Southerner's education and associations. His fortune, often, and he believed his happiness and prosperity, were largely dependent upon the perpetuity of the institution, as it existed in the Southern States. Upon it was founded the industrial interests of his section, and even his domestic establishment seemed impracticable without the glamour conferred by slavery.

This unanimity of sentiment was an element of strength in politics, and it proved itself capable of dictating party platforms and achieving some notable triumphs in Congressional Legislation, and was not without great influence in the highest judicial body in the nation, as witness the national platforms of the party with which the pro-slavery masses of the South acted in 1852, 1856 and 1860; the repeal of the Missouri compromise measures; the Kansas-Nebraska Legislation, the fugitive slave law and the Dred Scott decision.

The institution was a powerful element in our political fabric, and was the foundation for a large Southern representation in the House of Representatives, while, at the same time, our highest Court had declared that a slave or the descendant of an African slave could not be a citizen in the sense of the term as used in the Constitution of the United States, nor could he have any political rights; from which it followed that the threefifth slave representation was a property representation. And the Southerner insisted that his slave was a mere chattel, and that his title to him rested upon the same broad principle of right, and was governed by the same laws that applied to any other kind of personal property, and that therefore he had the absolute right to take and hold this property. But all attempts to delocalize the institution, finally failed, and it became

evident that the sentiment of the country was irrevocably fixed against the expansion of slavery.

The South now began to look forward to a possible separation of the slave from the free States, as the only certain means of securing the perpetuity of their cherished institution. With this eventuality in view, the old question of the powers vested in the Federal Government and the reserved rights of the several States, were diligently discussed and industriously propagated by Southern leaders in politics, business and society. Their theory practically denationalized the Government, and left it the mere representative of the co-partnership of sovereign States, any one or more of which could withdraw at pleasure. Stability could scarcely be hoped for, if the organic law were really of this character. And if it were clearly otherwise, so long as a large and influential section of the country believed its interpretation to be the true one, the practical application of that theory was only a question of time and circumstances, depending on some real or assumed provocation.

The election of Mr. Lincoln in 1860 was made the pretext for the inauguration of the fore-ordained experiment of secession of the Slave States; it was the practical application of the doctrine of State's Rights. President Buchanan doubted the power of the General Government to obstruct this process of disintegration, or to "coerce a Sovereign State." The Cabinet, Congress, and the officers of the Army and Navy, were largely in sympathy with these views, while many of them actively espoused the Southern cause.

Thus it came to pass, that between the date of Mr. Lincoln's election, in November, 1860, and his inauguration on the fourth of March, 1861, secession had made formidable progress, and a so-called Southern Confederacy had been actually established, with Jefferson Davis at the head of it, without hindrance or obstruction

1861.]

ATTACK ON SUMTER.

9

from the General Government. The seceding States had taken possession, without opposition, of the U. S. Forts at Beaufort and Wilmington; Forts Caswell and Johnson; the Arsenal at Fayetteville; Fort Barrancas, and the Navy Yard at Pensacola; the Arsenal at Little Rock; the U. S. Mint at New Orleans, and had practically dispossessed the parent government of its property and symbols of authority in a half-dozen Southern States, while the Administration of Mr. Buchanan looked on in a dazed and resistless condition.

In the meantime the South had organized an army and prepared for war; Sullivan's Island, in Charleston Harbor, had been fortified, with works bristling with hostile cannon pointing toward Fort Sumter, over which still floated the Stars and Stripes, and which was garrisoned by a small body of United States troops, under command of Major Anderson, a loyal Southerner. Every other Fort, south of Virginia, had already fallen into Confederate hands, without the firing of a gun, excepting only Fort Pickens.

On the fourth of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln succeeded Mr. Buchanan, and even he entertained hopes of some adjustment that should preserve the integrity of the country, and save it from the horrors of civil war; but it was not to be. In the Providence of God the time had come to recast and mould anew this Nation, and as the first gleam of light, on the morning of the 12th of April, revealed the grim walls of Sumter to the anxious watchers on Sullivan's Island, the boom of cannon rolled out from the brazen throat of a Confederate gun, and the last hope of a peaceful solution was crushed by the iron hand of fratricidal war. Battery after battery followed this signal gun, until Sumter was enveloped in fire, and stone and mortar trembled with the roar of artillery, and crumbled under the iron deluge that poured upon them.

Quickly following this disaster came a self-inflicted blow upon our Navy. At Norfolk, were the powerful forty-gun steam frigate Merrimac, the Cumberland, the Germantown, the Plymouth, the Raritan, the Columbia, the Dolphin, the huge three-decker Pennsylvania, the Delaware and Columbus, with over two thousand cannon; quantities of small arms, and immense supplies of war material and naval stores, valued at $10,000,000. These vessels, with one exception, were scuttled and fired, and the property abandoned by Captains McCauley and Paulding, of our Navy, who then, at four o'clock on the morning of the 21st of April, fled from the scene of their suicidal exploit, on board the Cumberland, lighted on their way by the nation's burning Navy.

As a thrilling epilogue to this disgraceful abandonment of the most valuable war material of the Government, it will be remembered that the rebels raised the Merrimac, and converted her into a powerful iron-clad ram, and that on the 8th of March, 1862, the monster came out from Norfolk Harbor on her mission of destruction. The escaped Cumberland and the Congress fell a prey to the fury of this novel and uncouth leviathan, whose mailed surface beat back the shot and shell which our devoted vessels poured upon it, as though they were rubber pellets. Indeed, but for the opportune arrival in the waters of Hampton Roads of the little Monitor and the gallant Worden, it is doubtful whether we could have held Fortress Monroe against the assaults of this almost impervious engine of destruction.

These untoward events alarmed and aroused the people in the non-slave-holding States, and led them, at last, to believe in the possibility of an internecine war between the Government and the revolted States. The effect was electrical. Party lines disappeared before the higher duty of patriotism. The uprising of the masses in favor of sustaining the just prerogatives of the

1861.]

THE SWORD THE ONLY ARBITER.

11

Federal Government, and maintaining the inviolability of the Union, was a grand spectacle. The universality of this sentiment of loyalty surprised and disappointed the Southern leaders. They were bold and able men, and most of them were sincere in their belief in the abstract question of the right of a State to secede. Behind them stood a constituency who had inculcated this dangerous doctrine from their youth, and who would tolerate no suggestion of its fallacy. The women of the South were even more tenacious of the rights of slavery, and the ultimate right of a State to withdraw from the Union, than the men were, and the moral influence they imparted to the cause was tremendous. To recede would have been political and social ruin to the leaders, and it remained only to settle the great issue they had thrust upon the country by the terrible arbitrament of the sword.