Attempt to Reinforce and Supply Fort Sumter

The South Carolinians struck the first blow (which rebounded so fearfully), and gloried in it. The commander of the battery on Morris Island (Major Stevens) that caused the Star of the West to put to sea, loudly boasted of his feat in humbling the flag of his country. The Legislature of the State resolved that they had learned "with pride and pleasure of the successful resistance of the troops of the State, acting under orders of the governor, to an attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter. The Charleston Mercury exclaimed: "Yesterday, the 9th of January, will be remembered in history-Powder has been burnt over the decree of our State, timber has been crashed, perhaps blood spilled. The expulsion of the Star of the West from Charleston harbor yesterday morning was the opening of the ball of revolution. We are proud that our harbor has been so honored. We are more proud that the State of South Carolina, so long, so bitterly, so contemptuously reviled and scoffed at, above all others, should thus proudly have thrown back the scoff of her enemies. Intrenched upon her soil, she has spoken from the mouth of her cannon and not from the mouths of scurrilous demagogues, fanatics, and scribblers. Contemned, the sanctity of her waters violated with hostile purpose of reinforcing enemies in our harbor, she has not hesitated to strike the first blow full in the face of her insulters. Let the United States Government bear, or return it at its good will, the blow still tingling about its ears-the fruit of its own bandit temerity. We would not exchange or recall that blow for millions! It has wiped out half a century of scorn and outrage. Again South Carolina may be proud of her historic fame and ancestry, without a blush upon her cheek for her own present honor. The haughty echo of her cannon has ere this reverberated from Maine to Texas, through every hamlet of the North, and down along the great waters of the southwest. The decree has gone forth. Upon each acre of the peaceful soil of the South, armed men will spring up as the sound breaks upon their ears; and it will be found that every word of our insolent foe has been, indeed, a dragon's tooth sown for their destruction. And though grizzly and traitorous ruffians may cry on the dogs of war, and treacherous politicians may lend their aid in deceptions, South Carolina will stand under her own palmetto-tree, unterrified by the snarling growls or assaults of the one, undeceived or deterred by the wily machinations of the other. And of that red seal of blood be still lacking to the parchment of our liberties, and blood they want-blood they shall have-and blood enough to stamp it all in red. For, by the God of our fathers, the soil of South Carolina shall be free!"

Such was the language of the Declaration of War against the Union by the politicians of South Carolina-arrogant, boastful, savage. Unmindful of the wisdom of the injunction of the king of Israel, "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off," they proceeded in hot haste, in the spirit of their Declaration, to inaugurate Civil War, and to drag the peaceful inhabitants of the other slave-labor States into its horrid vortex. The people, whose rights they had violated and whose sovereignty they had usurped, were stunned and bewildered by the violence of these self-constituted leaders, and they found themselves and their millions of property at the mercy of madmen who, as the sequel proved, were totally unfit to lead in the councils of a free, intelligent, and patriotic community. Four years after the war so boastfully begun by these political leaders in South Carolina, Charleston was a ghastly ruin, in which not one of these men remained; Columbia, the capital of the State, was laid in ashes; every slave within the borders of the Republic was liberated; society in the slave-labor States was wholly disorganized; the land was filled with the mourning of the deceived and bereaved people; and a large number of those who signed the Ordinance of Secession and so brought the curse of war's desolation upon the innocent inhabitants of most of the Southern States, became fugitives from their homes, utterly ruined. I would gladly draw the veil of oblivion over the folly and wrong-doing of these few crazy leaders, for they were citizens of our common country; but justice to posterity requires that their actions should be made warning beacons to others who, in like manner, contemplate rebellion against the divine law of the Golden Rule, and a total disregard of the rights of man.