Daniel Ammen, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.2, The Atlantic Coast
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

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Chapter 1: condition of the Navy at the beginning of the war.

Political events of great gravity occurring in Kansas, which grew out of the repeal of the ‘Missouri Compromise,’ and later, the ‘John Brown raid’ at Harper's Ferry in October, 1860, had familiarized the people of the United States with sectional hostility and bloodshed. The centres of direction of aggressive action were in the South, and of defence against them in the North. South Carolina had vauntingly sent her uniformed company ‘to defend her rights’ far away from her own soil, and the North had sent arms and men to resist force by force.

The violent unquiet element of the South had fully determined that the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency was in itself a cause of war, and it had so organized and armed its forces as to bear down any reasonable consideration of the differences between the two sections; nay, more, it had, aided by the demagogues of that section, constrained the men of thought and of character to accept the action of these men as embodying their own ideas. In coming centuries the remarkable address of Alexander H. Stephens at