Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/21

Rh ble humanity. He gave not only his goods to sustain women and children, but gave all his sons, five in number, to the cause. One by one they fell, until at length a letter arrived, telling that the youngest and last, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Benjamin of the hearth, had fallen also. When made aware of his desolation, he made no complaint, uttered no exclamation of heart-broken despair, but called his son-in-law, a delicate, feeble man, who had been discharged by the surgeons, and said, whilst his frail body trembled with emotion and tears rolled down his aged cheeks, &quot;Get your knapsack, William, the ranks must be filled!&quot; Every day some heart-broken mother showed the same spirit.

In the agitation that pervaded the South previous to secession, North Carolina preserved its usual conservative calmness of action. Her people, although profoundly stirred and keenly alive to the gravity of the &quot;impending crisis,&quot; were loath to leave the Union cemented by the blood of their fathers. That retrospectiveness which has always been one of their marked characteristics, did not desert them then. Recollections of Mecklenburg, of Moore s Creek, of Guilford Court House pleaded against precipitancy in dissolving what so much sacrifice had built up. Even after seven of her sister States had adopted ordinances of secession, &quot;her people solemnly declared&quot;—by the election of the 28th of February, 1861—&quot;that they desired no convention even to consider the propriety of secession.

But after the newly-elected President’s Springfield speech, after the widespread belief that the Federal government had attempted to reinforce Sumter in the face of a promise to evacuate it, and especially after President Lincoln s requisition on the governor to furnish troops for what Governor Magofrin, of Kentucky, called &quot;the wicked purpose of subduing sister Southern States,&quot;—a requisition that Governor Jackson, of Mis- —