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.

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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.  That institution existed at the formation of the Union, or compact.  It had existed for several hundred years, and in every State; the federation was fully cognizant of the fact when the agreement of the Union was reached.  They promised not to disturb it, and allow each State to control it as it seemed best.  Slavery was gradually but surely dying out.  Along the border States it scarcely existed at all, and the mighty hand of an All-wise Ruler could be plainly