fficer that carried out Jackson's military
dispositions when secession was threatened in South Carolina thirty years
before, and by other officers concerned, particularly by Major Anderson,
a keen Southerner, but a keen soldier, commanding the forts at
Charleston, and by Cass and Black in his Cabinet. Public opinion in the
North demanded such measures.

If further action than the proper manning and supply of certain forts had
been in contemplation, an embarrassing legal question would have arisen.
In the opinion of the Attorney-General, of leading Democrats like Cass
and Douglas, and apparently of most legal authorities of every party,
there was an important distinction, puzzling to an English lawyer even if
he is versed in the American Constitution, between the steps which the
Government might justly take in self-protection, and measures which could
be regarded as coercion of the State of South Carolina as such. These
latter would be unlawful. Buchanan, instead of acting on or declaring
his intentions, entertained Congress, which met early in December, with a
Message, laying down very clearly the illegality of secession, but
discussing at large this abstract question of the precise powers of the
Executive in resisting secession. The legal question will not further
concern us because the distinction which it was really intended to draw
between lawful and unlawful measures against secession quite coincided,
in its practical application, with what common sense and just feeling
would in these peculiar circumstances have dictated. But, as a natural
consequence of such discussion, an impression was spread abroad of the
illegality of something vaguely called coercion, and of the shadowy
nature of any power which the Government claimed.

Up to Lincoln's inauguration the story of the Charleston forts, of which
one, lying on an island in the mouth of the harbour, was the famous Fort
Sumter, is briefly this. Buchanan was early informed that if the Union
Government desired to hold them, troops and ships of war should instantly
be sent. Congressmen from South Carolina remaining in Washington came to
him and represented that their State regarded these forts upon its soil
as their own; they gave assurances that there would be no attack on the
forts if the existing military situation was not altered, and they tried
to get a promise that the forts should not be reinforced. Buchanan would
give them no promise, but he equally ref