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LINCOLN'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS—THE STRUGGLE FOR VIRGINIA—OPPOSING VIEWS EXPRESSED BY ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS—THE SLAVE-TRADE OF VIRGINIA—VIRGINIA DRAGOONED—THE FIRST CALL FOR TROOPS—LINCOLN'S FAITH IN THE PEOPLE—ORIGIN OF THE WORD "COPPERHEAD."

Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address was one of the ablest state papers recorded in American history. It argued the question of secession in all its aspects—the constitutional right, the reality of the grievance, the sufficiency of the remedy—and so far as law and logic went, it left the secessionists little or nothing to stand on. But neither law nor logic could change in a single day the pre-determined purpose of a powerful combination, or allay the passions that had been roused by years of resentful debate. Some of its sentences read like maxims for statesmen: "The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy." "Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws?" "Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?" With all its conciliatory messages it expressed a firm and unalterable purpose to maintain the Union at every hazard. "I consider," he said, "that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary." And in closing he said: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. … We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Oliver O. Howard. John A. Logan. William B. Hazen. William T. Sherman. Jeff. C. Davis. Henry W. Slocum. J. A. Mower. SHERMAN AND HIS GENERALS.

No such address had ever come from the lips of a President before. Pierce and Buchanan had scolded the abolitionists like partisans; Lincoln talked to the secessionists like a brother. The loyal people throughout the country received the address with satisfaction. The secessionists bitterly denounced it. Overlooking all its pacific declarations, and keeping out of sight the fact that a majority of the Congress just chosen was politically opposed to the President, they appealed to the Southern people to say whether they would "submit to abolition rule," and whether they were going to look on and "see gallant little South Carolina crushed under the heel of despotism."

GENERAL GRANT'S BODYGUARD.

GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT, WITH GENERALS RAWLINS AND BOWERS.

In spite of all such appeals, there was still a strong Union sentiment at the South. This sentiment was admirably expressed by Hon. Alexander H. Stephens in a speech delivered on November 14, 1860, in the following words: "This step of secession, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that must follow will rest on the convention for all time. … What reasons can you give the nations of the earth to justify it? What right has the North assailed? What interest of the South has been invaded? What justice has been denied? And what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? Can either of you to-day name one governmental act of wrong, deliberately and purposely done by the Government of Washington, of which the South has the right to complain? I challenge the answer. … I declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest of statesmen and patriots in this and other lands, that it is the best and freest Government—the most equal in its rights, the most just in its decisions, the most lenient in its measures, and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of men—that the sun of heaven ever shone upon. Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a Government as this, under which we have lived for more than three-quarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety while the elements of peril are around us, with peace and tranquillity accompanied with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed—is the height of madness, folly and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote." In a speech by Mr. Stephens delivered in Savannah, March 22, 1861, he expressed entirely different views; in expounding the new constitution, he said: "The prevailing idea entertained by him [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution was, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. … Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundation was laid, and its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, in subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Seven slave States had gone out, but eight remained, and the anxiety of the secessionists was to secure these at once, or most of them, before the excitement cooled. The great prize was Virginia, both because of her own power and resources, and because her accession to the Confederacy would necessarily bring North Carolina also. Her governor, John Letcher, professed to be a Unionist; but his conduct after the ordinance of secession had been passed appears to prove that this profession was insincere. In electing delegates to a convention to consider the question of secession, the Unionists cast a majority of sixty thousand votes; and on the 4th of April, when President Lincoln had been in office a month, that convention refused, by a vote of eighty-nine to forty-five, to pass an ordinance of secession. The leading revolutionists of the cotton States were becoming uneasy. Said Mr. Gilchrist, of Alabama, to the Confederate Secretary of War: "You must sprinkle blood in the faces of the people! If you delay two months, Alabama stays in the Union!" Hence the attack on Fort Sumter, out of which the garrison were in peril of being driven by starvation. This certainly had a great popular effect in the South as well as in the North; but Virginia's choice appears to have been determined by a measure that was less spectacular and more coldly significant. The Confederate Constitution provided that Congress should have the power to "prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy," and at the time when Virginia's fate was in the balance it was reported that such an act had been passed by the Congress at Montgomery.¹ When Virginia heard this, like the young man in Scripture, she went away sorrowful; for in that line of trade she had great possessions. The cultivation of land by slave labor had long since ceased to be profitable in the border States—or at least it was far less profitable than raising slaves for the cotton States—and the acquisition of new territory in Texas had enormously increased the demand. The greatest part of this business (sometimes estimated as high as one-half) was Virginia's. It was called "the vigintal crop," as the blacks were ready for market and at their highest value about the age of twenty. As it was an ordinary business of bargain and sale, no statistics were kept; but the lowest estimate of the annual value of the trade in the Old Dominion placed it in the tens of millions of dollars. President Dew, of William and Mary College, in his celebrated pamphlet, wrote: "Virginia is, in fact, a negro-raising State for other States." The New York Journal of Commerce of October 12, 1835, contained a letter from a Virginian (vouched for by the editor) in which it was asserted that twenty thousand slaves had been driven south from that State that year. In 1836 the Wheeling (Va.) Times estimated the number of slaves exported from that State during the preceding year at forty thousand, valued at twenty-four million dollars. The Baltimore Register in 1846 said: "Dealing in slaves has become a large business; establishments are made in several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle." The Richmond Examiner, before the war, said: "Upon an inside estimate, they [the slaves of Virginia] yield in gross surplus produce, from sales of negroes to go south, ten million dollars." In the United States Senate, just before the war, Hon. Alfred Iverson, of Georgia, replying to Mr. Powell, of Virginia, said Virginia was deeply interested in secession: for if the cotton States seceded, Virginia would find no market for her slaves, without which that State would be ruined.

¹ It is now impossible to prove positively that such a law was actually passed; for the officially printed volume of "Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America" (Richmond, 1861) was evidently mutilated before being placed in the hands of the compositor. The Acts are numbered, but here and there numbers are missing, and in some of the later Acts there are allusions to previous Acts that cannot be found in the book. It is known that on the 6th of March, 1861, the Judiciary Committee was instructed to inquire into the expediency of such prohibition, and it seems a fair conjecture that one of the missing numbers was an Act of this character. In a later edition (1864) the numbering is made consecutive, but the missing matter is not restored.

THE SIXTH MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT ATTACKED IN THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE, APRIL 19, 1861.

ON PICKET. (Showing photographer's outfit.)

After Sumter had been fired on, and the Confederate Congress had forbidden this traffic to outsiders, the Virginia Convention again took up the ordinance of secession (April 17) and passed it in secret session by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-five. It was not to take effect till approved by the people; but the day fixed for their voting upon it was six weeks distant, the last Thursday in May. Long before that date, Governor Letcher, without waiting for the verdict of the people, turned over the entire military force and equipment of the State to the Confederate authorities, and the seat of the Confederate Government was removed from Montgomery to Richmond. David G. Farragut, afterwards the famous admiral, who was in Norfolk, Virginia, at the time, anxiously watching the course of events, declared that the State "had been dragooned out of the Union," and he refused to be dragooned with her. But Robert E. Lee and other prominent Virginians resigned their commissions in the United States service to enter that of their States or of the Confederacy, and the soil of Virginia was overrun by soldiers from the cotton States. Any other result than a vote for secession was therefore impossible. Arkansas followed with a similar ordinance on the 6th of May, and North Carolina on the 21st, neither being submitted to a popular vote. Kentucky refused to secede. For Tennessee and Missouri there was a prolonged struggle.

When Fort Sumter was surrendered, the Confederates had already acquired possession of Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, Fort Pulaski at Savannah, Fort Morgan at the entrance of Mobile Bay, Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans, the navy-yard and Forts McRae and Barrancas at Pensacola, the arsenals at Mount Vernon, Ala., and Little Rock, Ark., and the New Orleans Mint. The largest force of United States regulars was that in Texas, under command of Gen. David E. Twiggs, who surrendered it in February, and turned over to the insurgents one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of military property.

On the day when Sumter fell, President Lincoln penned a proclamation, issued the next day (Monday, April 15), which declared "that the laws of the United States have been for some time past, and now are, opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law," and called for militia from the several States of the Union to the number of seventy-five thousand. It also called a special session of Congress, to convene on July 4. He appealed "to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured."

With regard to the reception of this celebrated proclamation in the South, Alexander H. Stephens writes as follows, in his History of the war: "The effect of this upon the public mind of the Southern States cannot be described or even estimated. Up to this time, a majority, I think, of even those who favored the policy of secession had done so under the belief and conviction that it was the surest way of securing a redress of grievances, and of bringing the Federal Government back to Constitutional principles. This proclamation dispelled all such hopes. It showed that the party in power intended nothing short of complete centralization. The principles actuating the Washington authorities were those aiming at consolidated power; while the principles controlling the action of the Montgomery authorities were those which enlisted devotion and attachment to the Federative system as established by the Fathers in 1778 and 1787. In short, the cause of the Confederates was States Sovereignty, or the sovereign right of local self-government on the part of the States severally. The cause of their assailants involved the overthrow of this entire fabric, and the erection of a centralized empire in its stead."

The effect of this proclamation in the North has already been referred to. Mr. Lincoln's faith in the people had always been strong; but the response to this proclamation was probably a surprise even to him, as it certainly was to the secessionists, who had assured the Southern people that the Yankees would not fight. The whole North was thrilled with military ardor, and moved almost as one man. The papers were lively with great head-lines and double-leaded editorials; and the local poet filled the spare space—when there was any—with his glowing patriotic effusions. The closing passage of Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," written a dozen years before, beginning:

"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

was in constant demand, and was recited effectively by nearly every orator that addressed a war meeting.

Eminent men of all parties and all professions spoke out for the Union. Stephen A. Douglas, who had long been Lincoln's rival, and had opposed the policy of coercion, went to the White House the day before Sumter fell, had a long interview with the President, and promised a hearty support of the Administration, which was immediately telegraphed over the country, and had a powerful effect. Ex-President Pierce (who had made the direful prediction of blood in Northern streets), ex-President Buchanan (who had failed to find any authority for coercion), Gen. Lewis Cass (a Democratic partisan since the war of 1812), Archbishop Hughes (the highest dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in America), and numerous others, all "came out for the Union," as the phrase went. The greater portion of the Democratic party, which had opposed Lincoln's election, also, as individuals, sustained the Administration in its determination not to permit a division of the country. These were known as "war Democrats," while those that opposed and reviled the Government were called "Copperheads," in allusion to the snake of that name. Some of the bolder ones attempted to take the edge off the sarcasm by cutting the head of Liberty out of a copper cent and wearing it as a scarf-pin; but all they could say was quickly drowned in the general clamor.

Town halls, schoolhouses, academies, and even churches were turned into temporary barracks. Village greens and city squares were occupied every day by platoons of men, most of them not yet uniformed, marching and wheeling and countermarching, and being drilled in the manual of arms by officers that knew just a little more than they did, by virtue of having bought a handbook of tactics the day before, and sat up all night to study it. There was great scarcity of arms. One regiment was looking dubiously at some ancient muskets that had just been placed in their hands, when the colonel came up and with grim humor assured them that he had seen those weapons used in the Mexican War, and more men were killed in front of them than behind them. The boys had great respect for the colonel, but they wanted to be excused from believing his story.

BURNING OF GOSPORT NAVY YARD, NORFOLK, VA., APRIL 21, 1861.

BURNING OF THE UNITED STATES ARSENAL AT HARPER'S FERRY, VA., APRIL 18, 1861.