476. Lincoln determines to provision Fort Sumter. It was a critical moment. To send reënforcements to Major Anderson would probably precipitate war. There was a widespread feeling in the North that if the Southern states wished to secede in peace, they should be allowed to do so. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, next to Lincoln and Seward the most influential man in the Republican party, wrote: "If the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in

never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets." Lincoln himself hated the thought of war, but his oath of office would not allow him to parley with disunion. On the eighth of April, therefore, he notified Governor Pickens of South Carolina that an attempt would be made to supply Fort Sumter

with provisions, but that no men or ammunition would be thrown into the fort except in case of resistance on the part of the state. 477. The Bombardment of Fort Sumter. When the Confederate government at Montgomery heard of Lincoln's intentions, it ordered General Beauregard, who was in command of some 7000 troops at Charleston, to demand the immediate surrender of the fort. Major Anderson refused to abandon his post, and General Beauregard, following orders from Montgomery, made ready to reduce Fort Sumter by cannon. Before dawn, on the twelfth of April, 1861, a shell rose from the mortars of Fort Johnson and, screaming over the harbor, burst just above the fort. It was the signal for a general bombardment. In a few minutes, from the batteries of Sullivan's,

Morris, and James Islands, east and south and west, fifty cannons were pouring shot and shell upon Fort Sumter. Anderson stood the terrific bombardment for two whole days, while Northern steamers lay rolling in the heavy weather outside the bar, unable to come to his relief. Finally, when the fort had been battered to ruins and was afire from red-hot shot, Anderson surrendered, saluting the tattered flag as he marched his half-suffocated garrison to the boats. 478. Lincoln's Call for Troops. The bombardment of Fort Sumter opened the Civil War. The day after the surrender of the fort (April 15) Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring that the laws of the United States were opposed in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas "by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding" and called on the states of the Union for 75,000 troops of their militia "to suppress the said combinations." At the same time he ordered all persons concerned in this uprising against the government to disperse within twenty days and summoned Congress to assemble in extra session on the fourth of July.

479. The Effect of the Fall of Fort Sumter. The fall of Fort Sumter and the President's proclamation meant the instantaneous crystallization of feeling both North and South. In the North men forgot party lines and political animosities. Douglas, the leader of a million and a half Democrats, hastened to the White House to grasp Lincoln's hand and pledge him his utmost support in defending the Union. Ex-Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, hitherto ruled by Southern sympathies, came over to the Union cause. Editors like Horace Greeley, preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, statesmen like Edward Everett, who had lately found the idea of forcing the Southern states to remain in the Union abhorrent, now joined in the call to arms. One thing only filled men's thoughts, the American flag had been fired on by order of the secessionist government at Montgomery. The South was rejoicing over the fall of Fort Sumter. Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, predicted that by the first of May the Confederate flag would float over the dome of the Capitol at Washington. Lincoln's call for troops, which to the North meant the preservation of the Union, was looked on by the South as a wicked threat to invade the sacred soil of sovereign states and subjugate a peaceful people who asked only "to be let

alone," to live under their own institutions. The Confederate Congress met "Mr. Lincoln's declaration of war on the South" by raising an army of 100,000 men and securing a loan of $50,000,000.

480. The Confederacy Enlarged. There were eight slaveholding states which had not joined the Southern Confederacy before the attack on Fort Sumter. Lincoln's call for troops drove four of these

states (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee) into the Confederacy; while Kentucky and Missouri, whose governors also had refused to furnish their militia for the purpose of "subjugating their sister states of the South," were kept in the Union only with great difficulty. In Missouri it actually came to civil war, the Unionist troops of Captain Lyon driving the supporters of Governor Jackson (secessionist) out of the capital.