uttering at the same time the famous boast which has linked his name
with an indissoluble association of folly. Shortly past noon on
Saturday, the message came which announced the surrender of the fort.
The city was frantic with joy. For hours, no forms of manifestation
seemed adequate to express the excitement which filled all classes of
society. Standing on the housetop in the evening, a wild crowd could be
seen flitting before bonfires, or ranging the streets, and shouting in
the ecstasy of an excitement which none could control. Immediately on
the arrival of the despatch, messengers had started into the country
with the welcome tidings, and deep in the night the ear was startled by
the dull roar of the cannon announcing the arrival in some distant
village of the joyful intelligence.

'That will be the end of the war,' said a man of well known
conservatism, who stood by at the announcement in Montgomery of the
surrender of the fort. It was the last expression of that fatal fallacy
which had lured so large a class quietly to acquiesce in the fact of
secession in the hope of thus securing the peaceful recognition of the
North. In a few days more, the whole deception had passed away. But the
correction had come too late. The Union party was extinct. Twice, in the
course of that great change, by the progress of which, a people, in
majority loyal, was converted into one totally disloyal and
revolutionary, it lay within the power of the Federal Executive, by
firmness and a proper exhibition of its powers, to have sustained the
Union party in the South and crushed the rebellion--before the election
of Mr. Lincoln, and at the time of the strong Union reaction in the
election of delegates to the State convention. At both these periods the
Union feeling was strong and increasing, immediately after each; pressed
upon by arguments which the course of the Executive had failed to
answer, it slowly declined. But no great sentiment is destroyed at once.
There is reason to believe that, if left to itself, the tide of Union
feeling might again have flowed back, and the faint traces of a
reconstruction party which appeared in the short interval of quiet that
belonged to the rebel confederacy indicates, perhaps, the path along
which it would have returned. But the time for these things had passed.

The fall of Sumter brought the doctrines of secession into instant
popularity, and roused a spirit of military enthusiasm in the South
sc