John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[77] and everywhere on his journey, and until his sudden death a few weeks later, he scarcely ceased his eloquent appeal to his fellow-citizens to rise in vindication of good faith, of system, of order in government; declaring, with sententious vigor, “every man must be for the United States or against it; there can be no neutrals in this war-only patriots and traitors.”

Such was the grand uprising of the North. The South, already for three months past in the turmoil of insurrection, was once more quickened to a new activity in her fatal enterprise. She felt that the assault on Sumter was her final cast of the die. Her people are proud and impetuous, stronger in physical than in moral courage, more prone to daring in behalf of error than of suffering to sustain truth. This quality was shrewdly recognized by one of the conspirators when he gave his hesitating confederates the brutal watchword: “You must sprinkle blood in the faces of the people.” Sumter was a bloodless conquest, but it nevertheless filled the South with the intoxication of combat. All sentiment adverse to secession and Southern independence had long since disappeared under the repression of a despotic public opinion; but now the fervor of a fanatical crusade transfused the whole Southern population; and their motley array of palmetto banners, rattlesnake flags, and almost as eccentric varieties of “stars and bars,” became, in their wild political lunacy, the symbols of a holy deliverance.

The Sumter bombardment, Lincoln's proclamation, and the enthusiastic war-spirit of the North, left the Confederate authorities at Montgomery no further hope of obtaining peaceable separation by diplomacy or intrigue. In their scheme of independence, while counting, with much greater accuracy than outsiders, upon the latent military resources of the South, they nevertheless seem to have based their