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 ...

468

468 ~ rTHE STOR~Y OP 3MY LI1P'L

have been glad to welcome Southern instead of Northern
troops. The South was in earnest, and the North now began to believe it.
The President of the Southern Confederacy had also
called for volunteers, and for men to take out letters of
marque, as privateers, to destroy the commerce of the North;
and his proclamation was received with an enthusiastic response. To meet this, President Lincoln declared all Southern ports blockaded, and denounced as pirates the corumissioned privateers. Nothing daunted, the Southern leaders
sent messengers to Europe, to obtain a recognition of the
Confederacy as an equal nation contendingr with the North.
As an inducement to England to break the blockade, they
promised her an ample supply of cotton, and to establish
free trade with her All -these events fired the North, and
kept the war spirit of the country at fever heat. In six
weeks from the fall of Sumter, over half a million of men
had volunteered for the defense of the Union, nearly two
hundred thousand of whom had been accepted, and were on
the nmarch or drilling, preparatory to active service.