ction, and to effect a number of important defensive precautions,
among which was the already mentioned concentration of a small military
force to protect the national capital.

Meanwhile, the governor of South Carolina had begun the erection of
batteries to isolate and besiege Fort Sumter; and the first of these, on
a sand-spit of Morris Island commanding the main ship-channel, by a few
shots turned back, on January 9, the merchant steamer _Star of the
West_, in which General Scott had attempted to send a reinforcement of
two hundred recruits to Major Anderson. Battery building was continued
with uninterrupted energy until a triangle of siege works was
established on the projecting points of neighboring islands, mounting a
total of thirty guns and seventeen mortars, manned and supported by a
volunteer force of from four to six thousand men.

Military preparation, though not on so extensive or definite a scale,
was also carried on in the other revolted States; and while Mr. Lincoln
was making his memorable journey from Springfield to Washington,
telegrams were printed in the newspapers, from day to day, showing that
their delegates had met at Montgomery, Alabama, formed a provisional
congress, and adopted a constitution and government under the title of
The Confederate States of America, of which they elected Jefferson Davis
of Mississippi President, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia
Vice-President.

It needs to be constantly borne in mind that the beginning of this vast
movement was not a spontaneous revolution, but a chronic conspiracy.
"The secession of South Carolina," truly said one of the chief actors,
"is not an event of a day. It is not anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's
election, or by the non-execution of the fugitive-slave law. It is a
matter which has been gathering head for thirty years." The central
motive and dominating object of the revolution was frankly avowed by
Vice-President Stephens in a speech he made at Savannah a few weeks
after his inauguration:

"The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the
leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution,
were 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 foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great
truth, that the negro is not