who it was that urged me on to its
completion.

To the publisher, E.H. Aull, too much praise cannot be given. He has
undertaken the publication of this work on his individual convictions
of its merit, and with his sole conviction that the old comrades would
sustain the efforts of the author. Furthermore, he has undertaken it
on his own responsibility, without one dollar in sight--a recompence
for time, material, and labor being one of the remotest possibilities.

D. AUGUSTUS DICKERT.

Newberry, S.C., August 15, 1899.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I

SECESSION.

Its Causes and Results.

The secession bell rang out in South Carolina on the 20th of December,
1860, not to summon the men to arms, nor to prepare the State for war.
There was no conquest that the State wished to make, no foe on her
border, no enemy to punish. Like the liberty bell of the revolution
that electrified the colonies from North to South, the bell of
secession put the people of the State in a frenzy from the mountains
to the sea. It announced to the world that South Carolina would be
free--that her people had thrown off the yoke of the Union that bound
the States together in an unholy alliance. For years the North had
been making encroachments upon the South; the general government
grasping, with a greedy hand, those rights and prerogatives, which
belonged to the States alone, with a recklessness only equalled by
Great Britain towards the colonies; began absorbing all of the rights
guaranteed to the State by the constitution, and tending towards a
strong and centralized government. They had made assaults upon our
institutions, torn away the barriers that protected our sovereignty.
So reckless and daring had become these assaults, that on more than
one occasion the States of the South threatened dissolution of the
Union. But with such master minds as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun in
the councils of the nation, the calamity was averted for the time. The
North had broken compact after compact, promises after promises, until
South Carolina determined to act upon those rights she had retained
for herself in the formation of the Union, and which the general
government guaranteed to all, and withdrew when that Union no longer
served the purposes for which it was formed.

Slavery, it has been said, was the cause of the war. Incidentally it
may have been, but the real cause was far removed from the institution
of slavery. Th