THE traitorous Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, had not lost sight of the probable uprising of the South at no distant period, for a moment, during all of his official career. Every fort on her soil was made an easy prey to her rebellious hand by reducing their garrisons. The magnificent Fortress Monroe, on which the United States had expended nearly two and a half millions, could muster only eight companies of artillery. The forts, Moultrie, Pinckney, and Sumter, of Charleston harbor, had only eighty men, who were in Fort Moultrie. And yet, had you been in the Halls of Congress when Mr. Clarke, of New Hampshire, offered a resolution of inquiry into the condition of those defences, you would have heard a storm of apparently virtuous indignation from Jefferson Davis and his fellow-conspirators, as if the intimation of treachery were an insult to Southern chivalry. A week later General Anderson and his band, loyal to the national banner, having become assured that their capture with Fort Moultrie was designed, after destroying its equipment as far as possible, stole at dead of night from its walls and floated over the waters to silent Sumter, whose massive battlements promised a safer refuge from the passions of infatuated men. The rebels immediately seized Forts Moultrie and Pinckney; and ten days later the Star of the West, an unarmed steamer conveying a reënforcement of two hundred and fifty soldiers and supplies for the destitute garrison, was fired upon from newly-erected earthworks. The spring came with flowers and birds, but the angry storm of rebellion beat around Sumter with increasing fury. Iron-clad batteries had risen on every hand to cut off the approach of our ships, and grim ordnance now pointed toward the old fortress. April 12th a messenger approached it with a very brief message to Major Anderson; it was, “Surrender!” The reply was nearly as short: “His sense of honor and his obligations to the Government would prevent compliance.” A few hours after, and “boom! boom!” was the sound, followed with shot and shell, against Sumter’s walls, which opened a bloody civil war. In the iron hail the fort was scarred, and its ground covered with exploding shells. At length the band, one-third the number of the famous warriors at Thermopylæ, against ten thousand, saw the hopelessness of resistance, and made honorable terms to themselves, of surrender. Every telegraphic wire in the land, North and South, trembled to the tidings of the battle hour. The Hon. Thomas Ewing wrote Charles Taylor Sherman, of Washington, the brother of William Tecumseh, to use his influence to get the latter again into the army. He felt that he was, and _would be_ needed. The intelligent, patriotic mind of the captain did not require _light_ for action, but only _opportunity_.