Beauregard had seven thousand. After a bombardment and a general fight of thirty-four hours, the starved and suffocated garrison yielded to overwhelming numbers.
President Lincoln was not admired by a class of people in the North and South who heard with horror that he had at one time worked for ten dollars a month. They thought the President's salary too much for him, and feared that he would buy watermelons with it. They also feared that some day he might tell a funny story in the presence of Queen Victoria. The snobocracy could hardly sleep nights for fear that Lincoln at a state dinner might put sugar and cream in his cold consommé.
Jefferson Davis, it was said, knew more of etiquette in a minute than Lincoln knew all his life.
The capture of Sumter united the North and unified the South. It made "war Democrats"—i.e., Democrats who had voted against Lincoln—join him in the prosecution of the war. More United States property was cheerfully appropriated by the Confederacy, which showed that it was alive and kicking from the very first minute it was born.
Confederate troops were sent into Virginia and threatened the Capitol at Washington, and would have taken it if the city had not, in summer, been regarded as unhealthful.
