of insurrection and rebellion and the supremacy of the national authority. Stimulated by his secretary's memorandum, Buchanan refused to withdraw Anderson; he would reinforce Anderson, but first the commissioners should know his decision. On the second day of the new year their reply was received: the whole story is told in the endorsement which the president ordered with the return of their letter to them: "This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it." Even Buchanan was stirred. "It is now all over," he said to the secretary of war, Holt; "reinforcements must be sent."

It was decided to send the man-of-war, Brooklyn, with adequate reinforcements and supplies, to Anderson, but the president and General Scott, fearing lest the ship might not be able to get over the bar at Charleston, at last, and unwillingly, changed their plans and dispatched the Star of the West, a chartered, side-wheel steamer of light draft, and leaving Sandy Hook with two hundred men and supplies, she lay off Charleston harbor, January 8th. Her coming was awaited, as Governor Pickens had been kept informed of her departure from New York. While yet two miles from Fort Sumter she was fired on from Morris Island and struck once. The Star of the West was merely a transport and was unarmed. Discovering no signs of aid or support from Fort Sumter and having yet to run past Fort Moultrie, the captain of the transport, fearing serious injury and convinced that he could not reach Sumter, reversed the steamer and hastened back to New York. Anderson meanwhile had got ready for action and doubtless had the steamer been fired on by Fort Moultrie, he would have replied. Anderson immediately demanded of Governor Pickens whether the attack on the Star of the West had his official sanction, which, if given, must be construed as an act of war. Pickens replied that the sending of the reinforcements was an act of war and that the firing on the steamer was justifiable. Abortive as the president's attempt to reinforce Anderson had proved, it tended to strengthen him at the North as it

also tended to strengthen secession at the South. Buchanan reorganized his Cabinet, John A: Dix becoming secretary of the treasury, the Northern members, Black, secretary of state, Stanton, attorney-general, and Dix, now giving it a national cast, not wholly to Buchanan's liking. But events were forcing him into a position from which he could not retreat without entertaining political principles which his severest critics have refrained from accusing him of holding.

During the last two months of his administration, House and Senate became theatres of a strange political drama: Davis and the lesser representatives from the South now freely, ardently and aggressively holding forth on the right of secession and announcing the impending dissolution of the Union. In all that the South thus said there was nothing new. All had been said again and again, and perhaps as effectively in the South Carolina Declarations as anywhere. The whole burden of Southern speech was the responsibility of the North for the dissolution of the Union. "You elect a candidate upon the basis of sectional hostility," said Davis, in the Senate, "one who, in his speeches, now thrown broadcast over the country, made a distinct declaration of war upon our institutions." It was the old slavocratic charge, dressed up now and then in new phrases.

Even at this late hour in the movement of events, Northern men, and such as Seward, of New York, could not see the impending outburst of civil war and continued talking of compromise. Seward thought, at this time, that secession ebullition would shortly subside, then a national convention might assemble and amend the Constitution. But the South had no thought of listening to further compromise. For this reason all attempts at compromise failed, and compromise was the earnest thought and wish of such men as Crittenden, of Kentucky. Even Lincoln favored a constitutional amendment which should forbid Congress to interfere with slavery in the States. In these closing days of Buchanan's administration no man in Congress who had the ear of the public demanded interference with slavery in the

slaveholding States. The Republicans could not, however, support any compromise which hinted at possible slavery extension into Federal territory, and to whatsoever extent they were responsible for the defeat of Crittenden's compromise they opposed it on that ground. Thus when during the last week of January the Southern senators and representatives began delivering their farewell speeches in Congress and withdrew, giving notice that when next they appeared it would be with arms in their hands as conquerors, if peaceable secession should be confronted by an attempt of the Nation to protect its own, the confidence yet lingering in the minds of Northern statesmen that the whole secession movement would yet quiet down and the Southern representatives would soon be back in their seats, seems blindness or self-deception, like the pathetic entry of Louis XVI, in his journal, on the eve of the French Revolution-"Nothing to-day."

And the South, meanwhile, was putting itself on a military footing. It had resolved on war. Governor Pickens sent to Buchanan a demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter, but it was the desire of Davis and his associates that South Carolina should not be brought to strike the first blow; they had accused the North all along of overt political acts tending to the dissolution of the Union-acts culminating in the election of Lincoln; and now they were planning that the South should appear in the eyes of the world as acting on the defensive, The remarkable fact is that public sentiment rather than political organization held the South together as one man; there were Union men at the South, and varying shades of politics among disunionists, but Davis and the secessionists knew the Southern mind: an attack on South Carolina by a national force, even the attempt to coerce the State would fire the Southern heart instantly and consolidate Southern sentiment in favor of separation and a Slaveholding Confederacy. It was not that Davis and other Southern leaders conspired together, for what they did they did openly, or sufficiently in the open that no man of fair intelligence

could misconstrue their motives and purposes. They made open and public announcement of their intentions; they published their Declaration of Causes. The oft-repeated conspiracy charge cannot sustain itself in the court of history. Rather than to a conspiracy must the historian look to a state of mind which possessed a great, a powerful people, eight millions of Americans, bond and free; and the mind of the bondmen cannot be cited, as, at that time, a source of weakness to the idea which controlled the mind of the master. Jefferson Davis stands forth in history as the expositor of a state of mind which, until events compelled its suppression, commanded the lives and fortunes of the South and evoked sympathy and aid from multitudes at the North. The Civil War did not originate in a conspiracy, but in a perverted state of mind, as other great conflicts have originated in a perverted state of mind. No one attributes the operations of the "Holy Office," the Inquisition, to a conspiracy; or the seemingly endless wars of religious persecution, to a conspiracy; or the cruelties of the Spaniards in the New World, to a conspiracy. Conspiracy is too insignificant, too weak a word to cover the terrible meaning of such events. We must get nearer human nature than a conspiracy can bring us: we must get close to the undeveloped reason and the undeveloped conscience, and the incapacity to interpret the simple laws in the economy of nature. The blind are not only they who will not, but they who cannot see. And in the history of civilization it is they who cannot see that will not, rather than they who will not see because they cannot.

President Buchanan, through the secretary of war, formally refused to surrender Fort Sumter to Governor Pickens. The governor's answer to the president was returned to him with the president's endorsement-"The character of this letter is such that it cannot be received." While this petty verbal warfare was raging, and the government was halting over reinforcing Anderson, in Fort Sumter, and Lieutenant Slemmer in Fort Pickens, on the Florida coast, there suddenly fell from the secretary of the treasury, John A. Dix,

an utterance which had the sound of new things: "If any one attempts to haul down the American flag," was the secretary's dispatch to a treasury officer at New Orleans, “shoot him on the spot." The order went from lip to lip at the North; it stirred the national heart. Not a sentence that Jefferson Davis or any of his secessionist colleagues uttered now lingers in the minds of men, but the laconic order to an obscure Federal official at New Orleans has passed into the lexicon of national sayings, along with Franklin's "Join or Die," with Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death," and Jefferson's "All men are created equal." Even rebellions and revolutions must pass the intellectual test, and the literature of the world enables us to distinguish between them: the war of 1776 was a Revolution; that of 1861, a Rebellion. Yet, as an event in the history of civilization, the American Civil War, in destroying a dominant state of mind, resulted in national changes and adjustments nothing short of revolutionary.

The situation during February, 1861, at the South, was not that of conspirators working under cover of darkness but of open military and quasi-civil activity toward the formation of a Slaveholding Confederacy. On the civil side such an organization could not have been possible at the North, and doubtless for this reason, Northern writers have described it as a conspiracy. The Southern Conventions which declared States out of the Union acted with an authority which could not be tolerated at the North, for the Northern idea of a Convention wholly differs from the Southern. Secession was promulgated at the South by these several State Conventions: at the North a question of less magnitude would be submitted directly to the people for their final decision. So too, the Montgomery Convention which framed the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, and elected Davis and Stephens and set the Confederacy going as a political concern, would be considered as a revolutionary body at the North and its acts as intolerable. A hundred men at the South in 1860-61