he will not use his guns against us unless ours should be employed against Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable." When this was communicated to Anderson, he announced, on April 12, that he would evacuate Sumter by the noon of April 15, and that he would not open fire upon the Confederates, unless some hostile act compelled him to do so, or unless before that time he received new instructions or additional supplies from Washington.

Beauregard's aides refused these terms, and announced that in an hour the Confederate batteries would open fire upon the fort. As the bombardment started, by a strange coincidence, a part of Lincoln's relief expedition was putting in toward the fort, but all the men could do was to watch the bombardment. This lasted all day, and began again actively on the morning of the 13th. In the afternoon, with the fort in ruins, Anderson accepted terms of evacuation. On April 15, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. War had begun.

No account of the causes of the Civil War, or the War between the States, as the South still prefers to call it, which is entirely satisfactory to both sides, has ever been written. Probably none will be, for centuries to come. Even now, after more than four hundred years, Catholics and Protestants are not in agreement concerning the causes of the Lutheran Revolt. The history of the Civil War, as taught in Northern schools, is ridiculed in the South, while that taught in the South is ignored or severely criticized in the North. Some historians are inclined to feel that both sides have something still to learn.

There seems to be a growing tendency to agree that the South had been developing as a separate and distinct section, if not a separate nation, with its own interests, social and economic. The growth of the North and West in very different directions intensified the contrast between those regions and the South. Furthermore, remaining as it had been from the beginning primarily an agricultural community, the South retained the states' rights philosophy, which had been held generally throughout the whole country while it was all primarily rural. As the North and West developed, their economic needs and interests sometimes came into collision with those of the South, as for example in the tariff.

FORT SUMTER

479

But in spite of these divergencies, the sections might have remained on friendly terms if the North, the larger section, the one growing more rapidly, had not become convinced that the social and economic system in the South was wrong. To this conviction was added a feeling of responsibility for the spiritual and moral welfare of the South, expressed in the abolitionist propaganda. From the earliest days of the Plymouth and Massachusetts settlements the desire to reform others had burned brightly in the Puritans and their descendants. The South did not feel the need of being reformed; in fact, it resented the well-meant, but tactless efforts in its behalf. Because the reform was aimed at the economic system, or a part of it which was regarded as essential in the South, the bitterness aroused was particularly keen. With the impulse to defend slavery just as determined in the South as the impulse to destroy it in the North, trouble was bound to develop, and develop it did, as the preceding chapters show. Northerners pointed to the very existence of slavery as an outrage to their civilization and their virtue, Southerners pointed to abolitionism as a thoroughly offensive, intolerable interference in their own private affairs.

It seems moderately clear that the existence of slavery by itself would never have brought on a war. To get up a fight over slavery required an attack upon the institution. This attack was delivered by the abolitionists. As the aggressors in trying to overthrow a part of the established order they were responsible for the bitterness in the South. The radical and antislavery elements therefore, with their work, must be listed as one of the fundamental causes of the war, and the responsibility is a heavy one. The contest over slavery in the territories was the product of the dispute stirred up by abolitionists and the reaction against it. Every attempt to restrict slavery stimulated the defenders of it, and roused them to action. To argue that the abolitionists were not responsible is to argue that the man who insults a neighbor whom he considers undesirable is not the

aggressor.

As for the immediate causes, it would seem that in attempting secession and in seizing federal property the southern states both as individuals and in their collective capacity as the Confederate government put themselves in the position of the aggressor. Southern writers argued then, as they still do, that the South did not want war and that there would have been none, had the North not commenced

the attack. Those who hold that belief overlook not only the seizure of property, but the infinitely more important attack on Fort Sumter. For a government which wanted only to be let alone the course of Davis and Beauregard with respect to it was, to say the least, very peculiar.

CHAPTER XLIV

MILITARY ACTIVITIES, 1861-1865

Before the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter the North had been characterized by indifference or indecision, or both. There was no visible evidence of unanimity, nothing to indicate that in case of crisis the new President could depend upon adequate support. Even so influential a molder of public opinion as Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune urged that "the erring sisters" be allowed to depart in peace. The news of Sumter startled the North, and shocked it into action. Filled with that exaltation which comes with the knowledge that a crisis has arrived, men hurried to enlist, to save the Union. A war merely to exterminate slavery would have failed dismally at the start. A war to uphold the Union was immediately, and through the Northern states, almost universally popular.

THE RESOURCES COMPARED

As the two governments, Federal and Confederate, took stock of their respective resources, it must have seemed to the former that the war was won before it began, so great was its superiority in all material assets. Had the South not been driven on by the most sublime faith in the justice of its cause, it could not even have entered the struggle. The Union consisted of twenty-three states, with a population of twenty-two million seven hundred thousand, while the Confederacy had eleven states, with a white population of about five million ninety-six thousand. This discrepancy in numbers was in part made up by the obvious geographical advantages which the South enjoyed. Fighting on the defensive, the South had shorter lines of communication, with far less difficulty in transporting troops. Its territory was well served by rivers, which facilitated Confederate movements, and made obstacles for their opponents. If it had not been for the railways built during the preceding decade, the South might have won.

In other respects the odds were heavily against the Confederacy. The chief source of revenue of its citizens was cotton, worthless if cut

off from a market. The value of this asset was practically destroyed by the Union blockade. Thrown back upon its own resources, the South was badly off. Manufacturing had never developed there and the section could not be self-sustaining. In the North there was a wide variety of manufacturing, most of which could be turned to account either directly or indirectly in the prosecution of the war. New England and the Middle States had textile mills and machine shops in numbers almost sufficient to take care even of the abnormal needs of war. Moreover the highly diversified and very profitable economic life of the North had made available the necessary capital for a long war. There had never been enough accumulated capital in the South to finance its own peace-time needs.

The South had confidence in its military resources. The seceding states had fair supplies of arms and munitions at the start. A larger portion of the population had been accustomed to outdoor life, to horsemanship, and to the use of arms, than was the case in the North. It was a common prediction that one Southerner could "lick" at least four Yankees. Besides, some of the best army officers, and West Point graduates then out of the service, went with their states into the Confederacy.

Both sides had to learn the art of war from practice in the field, and there the immediate advantages of the South were at first obvious. It was not until after 1863 that Northern resources began to tell. In 1860 the regular army consisted of about sixteen thousand officers and men. None of the officers had ever seen service with large forces, not even during the Mexican War. When Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers there was no one fitted by experience to handle an army of that size. The War Department had no plans or machinery for moving, clothing, or feeding such a force. Worse yet, the War Department was in the hands of a professional politician, incompetent in everything except his chosen field.

After the call for volunteers, the President devoted himself to the task of keeping the border states in the Union. Because Maryland was divided, with part of the population notoriously hostile to the Union, troops were massed in Washington. Others were placed at Cincinnati, with evident reference to their possible use in Kentucky, and others in St. Louis, Missouri. In this last state there was a local civil war, between sympathizers of the two "nations" under