The part of Montgomery in this tangled episode is least understood of the three. With Washington Montgomery had no official communication. Both Lincoln and Seward refused to recognize commissioners of the Confederate government Whether Seward as an individual went behind the back of himself as an official and personally deceived the commissioners is a problem of his personal biography and his private morals that has no place in this discussion. Between Montgomery and Richmond there was intimate and cordial communication from the start. At first Montgomery appears to have taken for granted that the Secessionist party at Richmond was so powerful that there was little need for the new government to do anything but wait But a surprise was in store for it During February and March its agents reported a wide-spread desire in the South to compromise on pretty nearly any terms that would not surrender the central Southern idea of state sovereignty. Thus an illusion of that day--as of this--was exploded, namely the irresistibility of economic solidarity. Sentimental and constitutional forces were proving more powerful than economics. Thereupon Montgomery's problem was transformed. Its purpose was to build a Southern nation and it had believed hitherto that economic forces had put into its hands the necessary tools. Now it must throw them aside and get possession of others. It must evoke those sentimental and constitutional forces that so many rash statesmen have always considered negligible. Consequently, for the South no less than for the North, the issue was speedily shifted from slavery to sovereignty. Just how this was brought about we do not yet know. Whether altogether through foresight and statesmanlike deliberation, or in part at least through what might almost be called accidental influences, is still a little uncertain. The question narrows itself to this: why was Sumter fired upon precisely when it was? There are at least three possible answers. (1) That the firing was dictated purely by military necessity. A belief that Lincoln intended to reinforce as well as to supply Sumter, that if not taken now it could never be taken, may have been the over-mastering idea in the Confederate Cabinet. The reports of the Commissioners at Washington were tinged throughout by the belief that Seward and Lincoln were both double-dealers. Beauregard, in command at Charleston, reported that pilots had come in from the sea and told him of Federal war-ships sighted off the Carolina coast. O. R. 297, 300, 301, 304, 305.