Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[107] rumours. Gen. Scott had advised the President that, in his military judgment, it had become impracticable to reinforce Fort Sumter, on account of the number of batteries erected by the Confederates at the mouth of the harbour; that an entrance from the sea was impossible. But Mr. Lincoln, and especially one member of his Cabinet, Mr. Blair, were firm in their refusal to evacuate the fort. It now became the concern of the government to avoid the difficulty of military reinforcements by some artifice that would equally well answer its purposes. That artifice was the subject of secret and sedulous consultation, that extended through several weeks.

About the last of March, Capt. Fox, of the Federal Navy, was sent to Charleston by the government, and stated that his object was entirely pacific. He was, by a strange credulity, allowed to visit the fort and to communicate with Major Anderson. His real object was to carry concealed despatches to Major Anderson, and to collect information with reference to a plan for the reinforcement of the garrison. On his return to Washington he was called frequently before President Lincoln and his Cabinet to explain his plan for reinforcing the fort, and to answer the objections presented by Gen. Scott and the military authorities. The project involved passing batteries with steamers or boats at night at right angles to the Confederate line of fire, and thirteen hundred yards distant --a feat which Capt. Fox argued was entirely practicable, and that many safe examples of it had been furnished by the Crimean War.

In this conflict of counsels the Washington administration hesitated. Mr. Lincoln, at one time, although with bitter reluctance, agreed that the fort should be evacuated, if the responsibility of the act could be thrown on the preceding administration of Mr. Buchanan. A leading article for a New York paper had been prepared, the proof-sheet of which was submitted to Mr. Lincoln and approved. In this, the ground was taken that the evacuation was an absolute military necessity, brought about by treason on the part of Mr. Buchanan, who, it was insisted, might have reinforced and supplied the garrison, but not only failed to do so, but purposely left it in such condition as to force his successor in office to encounter the ignominy of yielding it up to time Southerners. This same article lauded Mr. Lincoln's pacific policy, saying: “Had war — not peace --been his object,--had he desired to raise throughout the mighty North a feeling of indignation which in ninety days would have emancipated every slave on the continent, and driven their masters into the sea-if need be, he had only to have said--‘Let the garrison of Fort Sumter do their duty, and perish beneath its walls: and on the heads of the traitours and rebels and slavery propagandists be the consequences.’ ”

And yet the horrible alternative depicted here and indicated as the means of rousing the North to a war of extermination upon slavery and