till Fort Sumter was fired on by batteries of artillery, handled by
declared enemies, from the surrounding islands and from the city of
Charleston.

General Bragg, who certainly was a man of intelligence, and who, in
early life, ridiculed a thousand times, in my hearing, the threats
of the people of South Carolina to secede from the Federal Union,
said to me in New Orleans, in February, 1861, that he was convinced
that the feeling between the slave and free States had become so
embittered that it was better to part in peace; better to part
anyhow; and, as a separation was inevitable, that the South should
begin at once, because the possibility of a successful effort was
yearly lessened by the rapid and increasing inequality between the
two sections, from the fact that all the European immigrants were
coming to the Northern States and Territories, and none to the
Southern.

The slave population m 1860 was near four millions, and the money
value thereof not far from twenty-five hundred million dollars.
Now, ignoring the moral side of the question, a cause that
endangered so vast a moneyed interest was an adequate cause of
anxiety and preparation, and the Northern leaders surely ought to
have foreseen the danger and prepared for it. After the election
of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, there was no concealment of the declaration
and preparation for war in the South. In Louisiana, as I have
related, men were openly enlisted, officers were appointed, and war
was actually begun, in January, 1861. The forts at the mouth of
the Mississippi were seized, and occupied by garrisons that hauled
down the United States flag and hoisted that of the State. The
United States Arsenal at Baton Rouge was captured by New Orleans
militia, its garrison ignominiously sent off, and the contents of
the arsenal distributed. These were as much acts of war as was the
subsequent firing on Fort Sumter, yet no public notice was taken
thereof; and when, months afterward, I came North, I found not one
single sign of preparation. It was for this reason, somewhat, that
the people of the South became convinced that those of the North
were pusillanimous and cowardly, and the Southern leaders were
thereby enabled to commit their people to the war, nominally in
defense of their slave property. Up to the hour of the firing on
Fort Sumter, in April, 1861, it does seem to me that our public
men, our politicians, were blamable for not sounding the note of
alarm.