When the slavery struggles had culminated in war, and the South had fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, Beecher's heart was aflame. In his pulpit he said, "Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth!" When his eldest son--he had already enlisted--said, "Father, may I enlist?" the instant reply was, "If you don't, I'll disown you." After helping to fit out two regiments, Mr. Beecher took upon himself the entire equipping of a new one, called "The Long Island Volunteers," afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York. Plymouth Church parlors became a workshop, where, under Mrs. Beecher's direction, women made articles for the soldiers at the front. By personal solicitation large sums were raised from families and merchants. Mr. Beecher told his wife to use all his salary except the smallest amount necessary for family expenses. He made patriotic addresses which were read and talked about the country over. "It is probable," said the well-known journalist, Frederick Hudson, "that there is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man is Wendell Phillips." The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher said, "We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all that we have, and offer them up freely--but this country shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal. The Atlantic shall sound it, and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South--'One nation, one constitution, one starry banner!' Hear it, England!--one country, and indivisible; one hope; one baptism; one constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people--cost what it may, we will have it!" He urged _immediate_ and _universal emancipation_, with all the fire and eloquence of his nature. He became the warm friend of President Lincoln, with whom he had many confidential conferences. When the immortal Emancipation Proclamation was issued, declaring that after Jan. 1, 1863, the slaves "shall be thenceforward and forever free," Beecher said in his lecture-room talk, Dec. 31: "As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me and bark me and strip me of my leaves, and do as he chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough.... I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die."