For nineteen years this prophecy remained in manuscript, though copies of it were carried by "Mormon" missionaries and read to their congregations in various parts of the world. In 1851 it was published at Liverpool, the first edition of "The Pearl of Great Price" containing it. Therefore, it was a matter of public note and printed record long before the dire fulfillment began. Beginning of the Fulfillment.--The revelation had been in existence twenty-eight years, three months, and seventeen days, when, on the twelfth of April, 1861, the Confederate batteries in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter, thus precipitating the war between the North and the South. As is well known, it arose over the slave question, a circumstance fulfilling another of Joseph Smith's predictions--one dated April 2nd, 1843. [4] Southern States call on Great Britain.--How eleven of the Southern States, bent upon withdrawing from the Union and establishing an independent government south of the Mason and Dixon Line, called upon Great Britain, and were accorded a measure of encouragement by the ruling classes of that country, need scarcely be told here. The arrest and release of the Confederate commissioners, Mason and Slidell, who had been sent across the Atlantic to present the case of the seceding States at the Court of St. James; and the subsequent payment by the British Government of the Alabama claims ($15,500,000), for damages sustained by United States commerce at the hand of Confederate privateers, built and fitted out in British ports, tell in part the story. The Negro and Indian Questions.--It is also a matter of history, that many of the negro slaves, set free by President Lincoln's edict of emancipation, and trained as troops, fought in the Northern armies against their former masters. Whether or not this was a complete fulfillment of the forecast concerning the once enslaved people, remains to be seen. The race question was not entirely settled by the Civil War; it still hovers as a dark cloud on our national horizon. As for Indian troubles, many of which have arisen since Joseph Smith prophesied concerning them, while apparently they have ceased to "vex," more may yet be heard from that quarter before the problem is finally solved.