MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN A. DIX. From a photograph.

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FACSIMILE OF THE CONCLUSION OF GENERAL DIX’S “AMERICAN FLAG” DESPATCH.
“Treasury Department, January 29, 1861. Tell Lieutenant Caldwell to arrest Captain Breshwood, assume command of the cutter, and obey the order I gave through you. If Captain Breshwood, after arrest, undertakes to interfere with the command of the cutter, tell Lieutenant Caldwell to consider him as a mutineer, and treat him accordingly. If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.
“JOHN A. Dix, “Secretary of the Treasury.”
January 18tli, 1861, three days after he had entered on his duties as Secretary of the Treasury to President Buchanan, General Dix sent W. Hemphill Jones, chief clerk of one of the Treasury bureaus, to the South, for the purpose of saving the revenue-cutters at New Orleans, Mobile, and Galveston. January 29th, Mr. Jones telegraphed from New Orleans that the captain of the revenue-cutter McClelland refused to obey the Secretary’s orders. It was seven in the evening when the despatch was received. Immediately Secretary Dix wrote the following reply:
SECESSION HALL, CHARLESTON. Scene of the passage of the Ordinance of Secession. From a photograph.
WAR PREPARATIONS IN THE NORTH.
BY JACOB D. COX, MAJOR-GENERAL, U. S. V., EX-GOVERNOR OF OHIO, EX-SECRETARY
OF THE INTERIOR.
A member of the Ohio Senate on the outbreak of the War; made a brigadier-general in the Ohio quota, April 23d, 1861.
the dimly lit street, and called for Douglas with an earnestness of tone wholly different from the enthusiasm of common political gatherings. He came half-dressed to his window, and, without any light near him, spoke solemnly to the people upon the terrible crisis which had come upon the nation. Men of all parties were there : his own followers to get some light as to their duty ; the Breckinridge Democrats ready, most of them, repentantly to follow a Northern leader now that their Southern associates were in armed opposition to the Government ; the Republicans eager to know whether so potent an influence was to be unreservedly on the side of the nation. I remember well the serious solicitude with which I listened to his opening sentences as I leaned against the railing of the State House park, trying in vain to see more than a dim outline of the man as he stood at the unlighted window. His deep, sonorous tones rolled down through the darkness from above us, an earnest, measured voice, the more solemn, the more impressive, because we could not see the speaker, and it came to us literally as “ a voice in the night,”—the night of our country’s unspeakable trial. There was no uncertainty in his tone ; the Union must be preserved and the insurrection must be crushed ; he pledged his hearty support to Mr. Lincoln’s administration in doing this ; other questions must stand aside till the national authority should be everywhere recognized. I do not
question had been submitted to the decision of the sword. With most of us, the gloomy thought that civil war had begun in our own land overshadowed everything else; this seemed too great a price to pay for any good,—a scourge to be borne only in preference to yielding what was to us the very groundwork of our republicanism, the right to enforce a fair interpretation of the Constitution through the election of President and Congress.
The next day we learned that Major Anderson had surrendered, and the telegraphic news from all the Northern States showed plain evidence of a popular outburst of loyalty to the Union, following a brief moment of dismay. That was the period when the flag — The Flag—■flew out to the wind from every housetop in our great cities, and when, in New York, wildly excited crowds marched the streets demanding that the suspected or the lukewarm should show the symbol of nationality as a committal to the country’s cause. He that is not for us is against us, was the deep, instinctive feeling. .	.	.
A few days after the surrender of Sumter, Stephen A. Douglas passed through Columbus on his way to Washington, and, in response to the calls of a spontaneous gathering of people, spoke to them from the window of his bedroom in the hotel. There had been no thought for any of the common surroundings of a public meeting. There were no torches, no music. A dark mass of men filled full
had not wholly destroyed the hope that some peaceful way out of our troubles would be found; yet the gathering of an army on the sands opposite Port Sumter was really war, and if a hostile gun were fired, we knew it would mean the end of all effort at arrangement. Hoping almost against hope that blood would not be shed, and that the pageant of military array and of a secession government would pass by, we tried to give our thoughts to business; but there was no heart in it, and the “ morning hour ” lagged, for we could not work in earnest, and we were unwilling to adjourn.
Suddenly a Senator came in from the lobby in an excited way, and, catching the chairman’s eye, exclaimed, “Mr. President, the telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!” There was a solemn and painful hush, but it was broken in a moment by a woman’s shrill voice from the spectators’ seats, crying, 1 ‘ Glory to God ! ” It startled every one, almost as if the enemy were in the midst. But it was the voice of a radical friend of the slave, Abby Kelly Poster, who, after a lifetime of public agitation, believed that only through blood could his freedom be won, and who had shouted the fierce cry of joy that the
THE wonderful outburst of national feeling in the North in the spring of 1861 has always been a thrilling and almost supernatural thing to those who participated in it. The classic myth that the resistless terror which sometimes unaccountably seized upon an army was the work of the god Pan might seem to have its counterpart in the work of a national divinity rousing a whole people, not to terror, but to a sublime enthusiasm of self-devotion. To picture it as a whole is impossible. A new generation can only approximate a knowledge of the feelings of that time by studying in detail some separate scenes of the drama that had a continent for its stage. The writer can only tell what happened under his eye. The like was happening everywhere from Maine to Kansas. What is told is simply a type of the rest.
On Friday, the twelfth day of April, 1861, the Senate of Ohio was in session, trying to go on in the ordinary routine of business, but with a sense of anxiety and strain which was caused by the troubled condition of national affairs. The passage of “ordinances of secession ” by one after another of the Southern States, and even the assembling of a provisional Confederate government at Montgomery,