As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to “fire the southern heart” and light the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus.  The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the face.  As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the representative.  Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon him to take from him his father’s staff and his mother’s Bible.  Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in the future,—­the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please themselves and their rebel friends by calling a “wicked war”; if under any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat, in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake.  Half our navy would have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their peaks.  “Old Ironsides” herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,—­for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the red-handed conspiracy.  With all the great fortresses, with half the ships and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the traitors’ hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now triumphant faction?  Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee,—­saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by fire,—­have