what is coming.... Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet.... I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of States' Rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union." In February 1861 delegations from the seven seceding states met in Alabama and drafted a Confederate Constitution. Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new Confederate States of America. In the following months--as the first blood of the American Civil War was shed--Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined their fellow slave-holding states under the Confederate Flag. In April 1861 Confederate forces fired on a Union garrison at Fort Sumter, located in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This attack is regarded as the opening engagement of the Civil War (or the War between the States, as it was known in the South). Lincoln responded with a naval blockade. Avenues of discussion seemed exhausted; the North would have to preserve the Union by force. The North did have some significant advantages. "Omitting the deeply divided border states of Kentucky and Missouri," observed Robert Paul Jordan in The Civil War, "five and a half million white Southerners faced a total white population of some twenty million. The Union boasted more than eight out of ten factories, more than 70 percent of railroad mileage, all the fighting ships, and most of the money. What the South did have was faith and a consummate will to fight: faith in its cause and the will that springs like a well of strength when one's homeland must be defended." The South also had General Robert E. Lee, a brilliant military strategist who outmaneuvered Union forces for much of the war. The Union Army's early bid to capture Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, was foiled by their defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, one of several early Confederate victories. Union forces returned to the same region a year later,...
