Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

But it was chiefly through its moral effect that this first encounter was to exercise a powerful influence upon the war of which it was only the prelude. The South saw in this victory a kind of ratification of her claims. It was not only the Federal soldiers who were vanquished on that day, but with them all who had remained more or less openly loyal to the Union in the Southern States. They had protested against a simple insurrection; but success imparted to the government of Mr. Davis, in their estimation, an authority before which they all bowed; if a few secretly preserved their old attachment for the national flag, most of them fully submitted to the new power which had just achieved so complete a triumph. None of the enemies of the great Republic any longer feared to express their sympathies for a cause which seemed to prosper, or to give it moral and material aid. It required at this moment an unbounded faith in the energy of the American people to refute the arguments of those who believed that their ruin was already consummated; most of the European governments, who should then have exacted from their citizens a strict observance of the duties of neutrality, allowed from that moment naval expeditions to be fitted out in their ports, which were to give such powerful aid to the Confederate cause. In short, this victory inspired the South with unlimited confidence in her own resources and the conviction that she could never be vanquished. At the outset this conviction was a great element of success; it inspired her soldiers, already impressed with a sense of their superiority over their adversaries, with that daring which frequently determines the fate of battles. But at the same time it also rendered her improvident, and made her neglect many details the importance of which she felt too late; it prevented her, at this critical hour, from availing herself of all her resources, from calling together all able-bodied men, from organizing the interior defence of the States, which she thought could never be invaded; and, in this manner, it prepared the way for the disasters she met with in the West the following year. So that some of the military writers favorable to her cause have gone so far as to say that a defeat would have been more beneficial