General Robert Anderson, of Southern birth, was, in the autumn of 1860, assigned to Charleston Harbor, and there left with only 80 men to the presumed magnetic attractions of that affirmative place. To these his patriotism declined to be drawn. December 26, 1860, he removed from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, two miles farther off from the magnets. For eight months preceding, Mr. Floyd had sent heaps of muskets and ammunition, as desirable compost for the cotton-sprouts. Isaac Toucey, of Hartford, Connecticut, of a cold temperament, and from a cool latitude, thought the health of naval officers might suffer from the heats of Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, St. Augustine, Mobile, and New Orleans, and so ordered our ships to rove in distant seas. There was, therefore, no ordnance off the seaboard. The little garrison at Fort Sumter now became the pivot of the Union. Around the question of its reinforcement the Cabinet swung and went to pieces. General Cass, who had broken his sword before surrendering it to those who sought to prevent our Union, now broke his heart over the attempts of those who sought to shiver it in pieces. He was succeeded by Jeremiah S. Black, a gentleman devoted to the black family when enchained, indifferent to them when free. Floyd, one of the ring-leaders in the strike, skedaddled to Virginia, followed in his rapid journey by an indictment for having connived at the withdrawal of $870,000 worth of bonds from Jacob Thompson’s loosely managed Interior. His place was taken by the unbelieving Thomas, of Maryland, who soon became tangled by his want of faith, and was succeeded by General Dix, who had more confidence in guns than in Dixie. [Illustration: THE SKEDADDLE OF JOHN B. FLOYD. (p. 461) ] On the 4th of February, 1861, the en-gulfed States and South Carolina sent some delegates—chosen also somehow, somewhere, by somebody, in some way unknown—to Montgomery, Alabama, to a convention, where the leading strikers of course got upon the platform, and had the principal chairs. They proceeded forthwith to concoct that first-class patent medicine for all supposed ills, a constitution. In the composition of this draught _radex Africanus_ largely entered. It was to be poured out by slaves, and taken every waking hour. A separate government, called the Confederate, was set up by these somehow delegates. A flag was also devised, not in consonance with the avowed object of its bearers, namely,—a colored man saddled and running like an unpaid, tireless velocipede with a white rider in the seat working its shackled, eccentric way,—but with stars and bars,—stars rayless as night, and bars destined to be very sinister to the Southern hopes, and eventually to be leaped and beaten down by spirited Northern trampers.