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Rh Gulf. The people of those sections were very busy; they had heard much of this talk before, and looked upon it as a kind

of stage-thunder, the inevitable accompaniment of recent presidential elections. Republican politicians, with the exception of a few, were inclined to refrain from public declarations of intention. Some of them such as Seward, showed a disposition to let the “erring sisters” depart in peace, expecting to make the loss good by accessions from Canada. A few, like Senator Zachariah Chandler, believed that there would be “blood-letting,” but most of them were still doubtful as to the future. In the North the leaders and the people generally shrank from the prospect of war, and many were prepared to make radical concessions to avert hostilities. Among the various proposals to this end that offered in the Senate by John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, and known as the Crittenden Compromise, was perhaps received with most favour. This took the form of six proposed amendments to the Constitution, of which two were virtually a rephrasing of the essential feature of the Missouri Compromise and of the principle of popular or squatter sovereignty, and others provided that the national government should pay to the owner of any fugitive slave, whose return was prevented by opposition in the North, the full value of such slave, and prohibited the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia “so long as it exists in the adjoining states of Virginia and Maryland or either.” This proposed compromise was rejected by the Senate by a close vote on the 2nd of March 1861. A Peace Congress, called by Virginia, met in Washington from the 4th to the 27th of February 1861, 21 states being represented, and proposed a constitutional amendment embodying changes very similar to those of the Crittenden Compromise, but its proposal was not acted upon by Congress. Democratic politicians were hide-bound by their repetition of the phrase “voluntary Union”; they had not yet hit upon the theory which carried the War Democrats through the final struggle, that the sovereign state of New York could make war upon the sovereign state of South Carolina for the unfriendly act of secession, and that the war was waged by the non-seceding against the seceding states. President Buchanan publicly condemned the doctrine of secession, though he added a confession of his inability to see how secession was to be prevented if a state should be so wilful as to attempt it. Congress

did nothing, except to admit Kansas as a free state and adopt the protective Morrill tariff; even after its members from the seceding states had withdrawn, those who remained made no preparations for conflict, and, at their adjournment in March 1861, left the Federal government naked and helpless.

225. The only sign of life in the body politic, the half-awakened word of warning from the Democracy of the North and West,

was its choice of governors of states. A remarkable group of men, soon to be known as the “war governors”—Israel Washburn of Maine, Erastus Fairbanks of Vermont, Ichabod Goodwin of New Hampshire, John Albion Andrew of Massachusetts, William Sprague of Rhode Island, William Alfred Buckingham of Connecticut, Edwin Dennison Morgan of New York, Charles Smith Olden of New Jersey, Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania, William Dennison of Ohio, Oliver Perry Morton of Indiana, Richard Yates of Illinois, Austin Blair of Michigan, Alexander Williams Randall of Wisconsin, Samuel Jordan Kirkwood of Iowa, and Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota—held the executive powers of the Northern states in 1861-1862. Some of these governors, such as Andrew and Buckingham, as they saw the struggle come nearer, went so far as to order the purchase of warlike material for their states on their private responsibility, and their action saved days of time.

226. The little army of the United States had been almost

put out of consideration; wherever its detachments could be found in the South they were surrounded and forced to surrender and were transferred to the North. After secession, and in some of the states even before it, the forts, arsenals, mints, customhouses, ship-yards and public property of the United States had been seized by authority of the state, and these were held until transferred to the new Confederate States organization. In the first two months of 1861 the authority of the United States was paralysed in seven states, and in at least seven more its future authority seemed of very doubtful duration.

227. Only a few forts, of all the magnificent structures with which the nation had dotted the Southern coast, remained to it—the

forts near Key West, Fortress Monroe at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, Fort Pickens at Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. Both the last-named were beleaguered by hostile batteries, but the administration of President Buchanan, intent on maintaining the peace until the new administration should come in, instructed their commanding officers to refrain from any acts tending to open conflict. The Federal officers, therefore, were obliged to look idly on while every preparation was made for their destruction, and even while a vessel bearing supplies for Fort Sumter was driven back by the batteries between it and the sea.

228. The divergence between the two sections of the country had thus passed into disunion, and was soon to pass into open

hostility. The legal recognition of the custom of slavery, acting upon and reacted upon by every step in their economic development and every difference in their natural characteristics, surroundings and institutions, had carried North and South further and faster apart, until the elements of a distinct nationality had appeared in the latter. Slavery had had somewhat the same effect on the South that democracy had had on the colonies. In the latter case the aristocracy of the mother-country had made a very feeble struggle to maintain the unity of its empire. It remained to be seen, in the American case, whether democracy would do better.

229. Secession had taken away many of the men who had for years managed the Federal government, and who understood

its workings. Lincoln's party was in power for the first time; his officers were new to the routine of Federal administration; and the circumstances with which they were called upon to deal were such as to daunt any spirit. The government had become so nearly bankrupt in the closing days of Buchanan's administration that it had only escaped by paying double interest, and that by the special favour of the New York banks, which obtained in return the appointment of John A. Dix as secretary of the treasury. The army had been almost broken up by captures of men and material and by resignations of competent and trusted officers. The navy had come to such a pass that, in February 1861, a House committee reported that only two vessels, one of twenty, the other of two guns, were available for the defence of the entire Atlantic coast. And, to complicate all difficulties, a horde of clamorous office-seekers crowded Washington.

230. Before many weeks of Lincoln's administration had passed, the starting of an expedition to provision Fort Sumter

brought on an attack by the batteries around the fort, and after a bombardment of 36 hours the fort surrendered (April 14, 1861). It is not necessary to rehearse the familiar story of the outburst of feeling which followed this event and the proclamation of President Lincoln calling for volunteers. The 75,000 volunteers called for were supplied three or four times over, and those who were refused felt the refusal as a personal deprivation.

231. There had been some belief in the South that the North-West would take no part in the impending conflict, and

that its people could be persuaded to keep up friendly relations with the new nationality until the final treaty of peace should establish all the fragments of the late Union upon an international basis. In the spring months of 1861 Douglas, who had long been