The final stage of the controversy had been reached. The case had been appealed to the arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. Argument was at an end and brute force had come in as umpire. It was a melancholy spectacle over which the gods might well have wept. But men on both sides greeted it joyously as if it had been a holiday occasion. BOOK II THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR CHAPTER XI THE REDUCTION OF FORT SUMTER The events that brought about the Confederate War, the conditions and circumstances under which it occurred, and the passions and prejudices which inspired that bloody and most lamentable conflict have been sufficiently and quite truthfully set forth, the author believes, in the preceding chapters of this work. He has sought to show them forth without prejudice, and in a spirit of the utmost candor and fairness. It is the function of the historian to record facts, not to complain of them; to describe conditions, not to criticize them. After nearly half a century of study it is the firm conviction of the present historian that the Confederate war was a necessary and unescapable result of historic conditions; that nobody in particular was to blame for it, because there was nobody who could have prevented or averted it. History and circumstance had combined to compel its occurrence, and for its occurrence no person and no party was in any accountable way responsible. It occurred because the logic of circumstance compelled it, and it was fought out with conscience upon both sides. Incidentally there were wrongs done in its conduct, quite as a matter of course. He must be a stupid reader of history who does not understand that the doing of wrong is inevitable in every great historical event. But he must also be a very stupid and prejudiced reader of history who can contemplate the story of the Confederate war without realizing that on the one side and on the other conscience was the inspiring motive of it. He must be dull indeed who fails to see that devotion had its part to play on both sides and that on both sides it played it well, to the everlasting glory of the American name. The story of the war on the one side, and on the other, is a story of American heroism in courage and in endurance, in battle and in camp, in action and in the patient submission to hardship, in dash and in defeat, in assault and in retreat. The purpose of the succeeding chapters is to tell that story without passion or prejudice, without fear or favor, and with no flinching from the truth, whithersoever it may lead. So far as actual fighting was concerned, the war began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor on the morning of April 12, 1861.