Union. Northern arsenals were stripped of arms. Southern officers went out of the army one by one, and made ready to organize the army of the new Confederacy which was forming under the president's nose.
It was a time for the strong arm, and for quick, decisive, Jacksonian, and not at all squeamish, action. But no such action was taken. The golden moment was lost, and when, three months afterward, Lincoln came in at last, war, with all its horrors, was upon the country.
If the young rebellion had been truly nipped in the bud, as it might have been, by a rigid enforcement, in November and December, 1860, of Federal judicial processes in South Carolina; if the laws of the United States had been enforced in that State at the point of the bayonet, if need be; if a Federal functionary, sustained by an ample force of United States troops, had torn South Carolina's ordinance of secession into
