It is often said that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and began an aggressive war to destroy the Union, before the South was ready. Probably the fact in the case is that South Carolina was trying to "fire the Southern heart," and force the State of Virginia into the secession movement. The Old Dominion State was naturally a Union State. It was a Virginian who uttered the most impassioned words in the history of liberty--Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. It was a Virginian who led the colonial armies to victory--Washington. It was a Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence--Thomas Jefferson. He too, a Virginian governor, made the great protest to King George against the further imposition of slavery by force of arms. He too, a Virginian, the founder of Washington and Jefferson College, had called upon the men of the Dominion State to rise up and destroy the curse of slavery. But from the moment when that shell rose through the pathless air, curved slightly and burst above Sumter, the die was cast. Five days later, Virginia passed her ordinance of secession. Oh, if the veil could have been lifted from Beauregard's eyes when he began that bombardment! If he could but have seen the riches become poverty, cities become a waste, happy homes a desolation, the Southern hillsides covered with graves, the Southern plantations grown up with weeds, and the whole secession movement futile, what a vision would have fallen upon the soldier! On the 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, the students of law and medicine and theology closed their books, the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the woodsman dropped his ax, the carpenter his hammer, and the young men of twenty-three States sprang to arms. What astonished the South most of all was the attitude of Douglas, and the Northern Democrats, who had been confidently counted upon to stand by secession. One Southern fire-eater had said that "Douglas and the Democrats will fight Lincoln and the Republicans, and it will be another case of the Kilkenny cats, leaving the South in peace to build up a great empire." But the first thing that Stephen A. Douglas did was to go to the White House and pledge his support to Lincoln, as did the leading Democrats of the North. "The attack upon Sumter," said Douglas, "leaves us but two parties--patriots and traitors." And now the war was on,--the one side fighting for the Federal Union and liberty for all men, and the other side fighting for State sovereignty and slavery.