annon, cut down the flagstaff, and
removed to Fort Sumter, on the evening of December 26, 1860.

[Illustration: CHARLESTON HARBOR]

This act was heartily approved by the people of the North and by
Congress, and Buchanan with great reluctance yielded to their demand,
and sent the _Star of the West,_ with food and men, to relieve Anderson.
But as the vessel, with our flag at its fore, was steaming up the
channel toward Charleston harbor, the Southern batteries fired upon her,
and she went back to New York. Anderson was thus left to his fate, and
as Buchanan's term was nearly out, both sides waited to see what
Lincoln would do.

%421. Why did the States secede?%--Why did the Southern slave states
secede? To be fair to them we must seek the answer in the speeches of
their leaders. "Your votes," said Jefferson Davis, "refuse to recognize
our domestic institutions [slavery], which preexisted the formation of
the Union, our property [slaves], which was guaranteed by the
Constitution. You refuse us that equality without which we should be
degraded if we remained in the Union. You elect a candidate upon the
basis of sectional hostility; one who in his speeches, now thrown
broadcast over the country, made a distinct declaration of war upon our
institutions."

"There is," said Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury of
the United States, "no other remedy for the existing state of things
except immediate secession."

"Our position," said the Mississippi secession convention, "is
thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. A blow at slavery
is a blow at commerce and civilization. There was no choice left us but
submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union."

Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, asserted
that the Personal Liberty laws of some of the free states "constitute
the only cause, in my opinion, which can justify secession."

The South seceded, then, according to its own statements, because the
people believed that the election of Lincoln meant the abolition
of slavery.

%422. Compromise attempted%.--The Republican party in 1861 had no
intention of abolishing slavery. Its purpose was to stop the spread of
slavery into the territories, to stop the admission of more slave
states, but not to abolish slavery in states where it already existed. A
strong wish therefore existed in the North to compromise the sectional
differences. Many plans for a com