This not proving more remunerative than Grant's farming, he offered himself to the army again in 1859, feeling, that a sure, though small, amount was better for his family than the uncertainties of business. He was soon appointed the superintendent of a military college about to be organized at Alexandria, Louisiana. This position did not prove an easy one. The building was a large and handsome one in the midst of four hundred acres of pine-land, but there was not a table, chair, or black-board ready for beginning. Sherman immediately engaged some carpenters, and went to work with his usual energy. Meantime, the slavery question bade fair to rend the Union asunder. South Carolina seceded Dec. 20, 1860, and Mississippi soon after. In the middle of January, 1861, Sherman wrote to the Governor of the State: "If Louisiana withdraw from the Federal Union, I prefer to maintain my allegiance to the Constitution as long as a fragment of it survives.... I beg you to take immediate steps to relieve me as superintendent, the moment the State determines to secede, for on no earthly account will I do any act or think any thought hostile to, or in defiance of, the old Government of the United States." Sherman soon came North and visited his brother, Senator John Sherman. Both called upon Lincoln, and the President asked the soldier "how the people of the South were getting along." "They think," was the reply of Sherman, "they are getting along swimmingly--they are preparing for war." "Oh, well!" said Lincoln, "I guess we'll manage to keep house." April 1, through the influence of friends, Sherman was made President of the Fifth Street Railroad, in St. Louis, at a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a year, and moved his family thither. Five days later, and six days before the attack on Sumter, April 12, 1861, he was asked to accept the chief clerkship of the War Department, with the promise that, when Congress met, he should be made Assistant Secretary of War. This offer he declined, as he had already moved his family to St. Louis, and did not feel at liberty to change his position. He wrote later to Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, that he would not volunteer for _three months_, "Because," said he, "I cannot throw my family on the cold charity of the world," but for a _three-years_' call, good service might be done. He was appointed Colonel of the Thirteenth Regular Infantry, May 14, 1861, and again his family returned to Lancaster, Ohio. The war feeling had been greatly intensified at the North by the death of Colonel E. Elmer Ellsworth, a young man of twenty-four, who had organized a body of Zouaves in Chicago, and had escorted President Lincoln to Washington. On May 24, when the Union forces crossed into Virginia, Ellsworth's Zouaves occupied Alexandria. A part of the troops were proceeding towards the centre of the town, when they saw a secession flag flying from the Marshall House.