When the troubles leading up to the Civil War opened, Savannah did not wait for the State of Georgia to secede, but, true to the traditions of Revolutionary ancestry, seized Fort Pulaski on the 3d of January, 1861. The State convention, which framed a new constitution for Georgia, assembled in Savannah on the 7th of March, and the flag of the Confederacy was thrown to the breeze from the United States Custom-House with a salute of seven guns, one for each State of the young nation. The moving spirit of secession in Savannah, the “Mad Anthony Wayne” of the State, was Francis S. Bartow, a young man who, failing to receive permission from the State authorities to go to Virginia, summoned his company and went without orders, sending back in defiance the message to Governor Brown: “I go to illustrate Georgia.” He was killed with several of his command at the first battle of Manassas, so that Savannah received the baptism of blood at the very beginning of the Civil War. In November, 1861, General Robert E. Lee made his headquarters in Savannah and inspected its defences. He pronounced Fort Pulaski impregnable, and said its walls, which were seven and a half feet thick, would withstand the heaviest cannon. The rifled guns of large calibre, however, had not then been tested, and their penetrating power was unknown. As a matter of fact, the fort was breached by Union batteries from Tybee Island in one day. On the 11th of April, 1862, General Gillmore, who had constructed the fort for the Government at a cost of $500,000, reduced it at a range of from two thousand to three thousand five hundred yards. One remarkable fact about the defence of Fort Pulaski was that the Confederates allowed the Northern fleet to sail back of the fort through Wall’s Cut, and interrupt communication with the city. It was through this identical channel that the British reinforced their troops in 1779, the French fleet failing to guard the narrow pass. In July, 1863, the Confederate ironclad ship _Atlanta_, fitted out in Savannah, sailed for Warsaw Sound to meet the monitors _Weehawken_ and _Nahant_. The _Atlanta_ ran aground, and was shot to pieces by her antagonists. On December 26, 1864, General Sherman’s army captured the city, eighty-six years, almost to the day, after the British captured it from General Howe. Savannah then contained about twenty thousand people. To-day it has over sixty thousand, is the largest and busiest seaport on the South Atlantic, ships more than a million bales of cotton a year, and handles more than a million packages of naval stores. At Tybee Roads, where Oglethorpe first anchored his good ship _Ann_; where the English fleet halted before attacking the town; where D’Estaing moored his French frigates and waited for the Americans to join him; where the colonists captured the powder ship from the English, the first naval engagement of the Revolution; where the sturdy Southern ironclad met