[106]
and in enforcing its laws.
This act fired the patriotic heart and solidified the patriotic ranks, and, with the crumbling of the walls upon Fort Sumter, were shattered all the hopes previously entertained of a peaceful solution of the problems which were then before the country.
I have very little doubt that the assault upon Fort Sumter was ordered by the rebel government, under the fallacious hope and groundless belief that it would not provoke immediate or wide-spread civil war. The Southern leaders were well aware of the fact that the frontier could not be entirely stripped of regulars, and assuming, or pretending to, that the existing laws contained no provision authorizing a call of the militia, they inferred that it would be difficult for the new administration to obtain at once legislation of a coercive character.
Then, too, they relied, in a great measure, upon a friendly feeling toward the South from their late political associates in the North; but in this their reckoning was at fault, and the roar of Beauregard's guns in Charleston Harbor cleared up the political horizon as if by magic.
There could no longer be any doubt as to the position and intentions of the Confederates.
Seven disloyal States, with all their machinery of a separate government, stood behind those batteries, and the cool deliberation of the assault gave evidence of plan, of purpose and of confidence.
What had been
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