The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

THE OPENrNG OF THE CIVIL WAR.

463

yards with ships of war, cannon, forts, and fortifications.
During that terrible winter, over forty millions of federal
property were filched from the control of the nation.
Hitherto the national flag had always been respected,
even in times of the highest excitement. But now, flying
from the mast-head of a government vessel as it steamed
into Charleston Harbor, with provisions for the brave little
garrison at Fort Sumter, it was fired upon. Then the
seceded states came together, formed what they called a
" Southern Confederacy," elected Jefferson Davis their President, who delivered his inaugural meissage, and the South
gave itself up to a very intoxication of delight. Still the
North remained inactive. This inaction was called cowardice by the South, and our neutral enemies on the other side
of the water interpreted it as lack of patriotism. It was
neither. It was the ominous hush that preludes the coming
tempest,--the repressed eagerness of an animal at bay preparing for a deadlier spring,--the awful pause preceding
the inevitable collision between two mighty combatants, the
crash of which would shake the continent.
Running the very gauntlet of assassination, and passing
the conspirators against his life in such disguise that they
failed to recognize him, Mr. Lincoln proceeded to Washington, and was inaugurated President of the United States.
Never had one of his predecessors in office faced so awful a
term of service as he; and a premonition of its dread events
and tragic termination closed round him like a pall. The
five months of national disintegration now reached their
climax. A volcanic fire of fifty heavy breaching guns was
poured upon Fort Sumter bf the infuriated South, and as its
walls crashed and crumbled under the fierce bombardment,
the loyal little garrison that had sought to hold it for
the nation, was compelled to surrender. The jiews of the