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CHAPTER I.
BULL RUN - THE VOLUNTEERS FACE FIRE
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HERE had been strife, a bloodless, political strife, for forty years between the two great sections of the American nation. No efforts to reconcile the estranged brethren of the same household had been successful. The ties that bound the great sections of the country had severed one by one; their contention had grown stronger through all these years, until at last there was nothing left but a final appeal to the arbitrament of the sword-then came the great war, the greatest civil war in the annals of mankind. "
Hostilities " began with the secession of South Carolina from the Union, December 20, 1860. On January 9, 1861, the Star of the West was fired upon in Charleston Harbor. For the first time in the nation's history the newly-elected President had entered the capital city by night and in secret in the fear of the assassins plots.
For the first time he had been inaugurated under a military guard. Then came the opening shots, and the ruined walls of the noble fort in Charleston Harbor told the story of the beginnings of the fratricidal war. The fall of Sumter, on April 14. 1861, had aroused the North to the imminence of the crisis, revealing the danger that threatened the Union and calling forth a determination to preserve it. The same event had unified the South: four additional States cast their lot with the seven which had already seceded from the Union. Virginia, the Old Dominion, the first born of the sisterhood of States, swung into the secession column three days after the fall of Sumter: the next day, April 18th, she seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry and on the 20th the great navy-yard at Norfolk.
Two governments, each representing a different economic
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