of state sovereignty.  Thus an illusion of that day—­as of this—­was exploded, namely the irresistibility of economic solidarity.  Sentimental and constitutional forces were proving more powerful than economics.  Thereupon Montgomery’s problem was transformed.  Its purpose was to build a Southern nation and it had believed hitherto that economic forces had put into its hands the necessary tools.  Now it must throw them aside and get possession of others.  It must evoke those sentimental and constitutional forces that so many rash statesmen have always considered negligible.  Consequently, for the South no less than for the North, the issue was speedily shifted from slavery to sovereignty.  Just how this was brought about we do not yet know.  Whether altogether through foresight and statesmanlike deliberation, or in part at least through what might almost be called accidental influences, is still a little uncertain.  The question narrows itself to this:  why was Sumter fired upon precisely when it was?  There are at least three possible answers.

(1) That the firing was dictated purely by military necessity.  A belief that Lincoln intended to reinforce as well as to supply Sumter, that if not taken now it could never be taken, may have been the over-mastering idea in the Confederate Cabinet.  The reports of the Commissioners at Washington were tinged throughout by the belief that Seward and Lincoln were both double-dealers.  Beauregard, in command at Charleston, reported that pilots had come in from the sea and told him of Federal war-ships sighted off the Carolina coast.  O. R. 297, 300, 301, 304, 305.

(2) A political motive which to-day is not so generally intelligible as once it was, had great weight in 1861.  This was the sense of honor in politics.  Those historians who brush it aside as a figment lack historical psychology.  It is possible that both Governor Pickens and the Confederate Cabinet were animated first of all by the belief that the honor of South Carolina required them to withstand the attempt of what they held to be an alien power.

(3) And yet, neither of these explanations, however much either or both may have counted for in many minds, gives a convincing explanation of the agitation of Toornbs in the Cabinet council which decided to fire upon Sumter.  Neither of these could well be matters of debate.  Everybody had to be either for or against, and that would be an end.  The Toombs of that day was a different man from the Toombs of three months earlier.  Some radical change had taken place in his thought What could it have been if it was not the perception that the Virginia program had put the whole matter in a new light, that the issue had indeed been changed from slavery to sovereignty, and that to join battle on the latter issue was a far more serious matter than to join battle on the former.  And if Toombs reasoned in this fearful way, it is easy to believe that the more buoyant natures in that council may well have reasoned in precisely