ot, sultry day,
when the great city has exhaled poisonous gases, the clouds are piled
mountain high on the horizon. Then a hush comes. Not a leaf stirs. It is
hard to breathe. Suddenly one bolt leaps from the east to the west--the
precursor of ten thousand fiery darts that are to burn the poison away,
and of the heavy rains and winds that will wash the air and make it
sweet and clean. On the 12th of April the silence for the nation was
broken by the shot fired at Fort Sumter. The bomb that went shrieking
through the air was the precursor of a million men in arms, the most
frightful carnage, the most terrible war in history, when brother took
up arms against brother, and the whole land became one vast cemetery.

It is often said that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and began an
aggressive war to destroy the Union, before the South was ready.
Probably the fact in the case is that South Carolina was trying to "fire
the Southern heart," and force the State of Virginia into the secession
movement. The Old Dominion State was naturally a Union State. It was a
Virginian who uttered the most impassioned words in the history of
liberty--Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. It was a Virginian who led the
colonial armies to victory--Washington. It was a Virginian who wrote the
Declaration of Independence--Thomas Jefferson. He too, a Virginian
governor, made the great protest to King George against the further
imposition of slavery by force of arms. He too, a Virginian, the founder
of Washington and Jefferson College, had called upon the men of the
Dominion State to rise up and destroy the curse of slavery. But from the
moment when that shell rose through the pathless air, curved slightly
and burst above Sumter, the die was cast. Five days later, Virginia
passed her ordinance of secession.

Oh, if the veil could have been lifted from Beauregard's eyes when he
began that bombardment! If he could but have seen the riches become
poverty, cities become a waste, happy homes a desolation, the Southern
hillsides covered with graves, the Southern plantations grown up with
weeds, and the whole secession movement futile, what a vision would
have fallen upon the soldier!

On the 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked
for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled
a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In
one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, t