“SIR: As I occupy a quasi-military position under this state, I deem it proper to acquaint you that I accepted such position when Louisiana was a state in the Union, and when the motto of the seminary, inserted in marble over the main door, was: ‘By the liberality of the general Government of the United States--the Union--_Esto Perpetua_.’ Recent events foreshadow a great change, and it becomes all men to choose. If Louisiana withdraws from the Federal Union, I prefer to maintain my allegiance to the old Constitution as long as a fragment of it survives, and my longer stay here would be wrong in every sense of the word. In that event, I beg you will send or appoint some authorized agent to take charge of the arms and munitions of war here, belonging to the state, or direct me what disposition should be made of them. “And furthermore, as president of the board of supervisors, I beg you to take immediate steps to relieve me as superintendent the moment the state determines to secede, for on no earthly account will I do an act, or think any thought, hostile to or in defiance of the old Government of the United States.” Up to this date, Captain Sherman was not much known as a lawyer or statesman, and as a military genius, the South found they had mis-measured his patriotism and that which constituted his make-up. Few, if any, had heard the reply of the little fatherless boy to the minister who hesitated to give him the name of “a heathen,” (_Tecumseh_,) in baptism. “My father called me Tecumseh, and Tecumseh I’ll be called--If you won’t, I’ll not have any of your baptism.” This was the character of General Sherman, whose talents were as bright as was his life, pure and courageous. At the commencement of the war he was assailed on all sides, by the petty jealousies indigenous to public life; but nothing could retard his progress to the front, any more than it could his march to the sea--one of Ohio’s legitimate “Squirrel Hunters” born with his hand on Esau’s heel. The war came, and on the 12th day of April, 1861, the first gun was fired. The Government was not alarmed, but was firm in the determination to preserve the Union at all cost, and looked upon the prospects of final success of secession as impossible against the will of the vast population and resources of the North-western States, and held to the truth of General Jackson’s answer to Calhoun: “Secession is treason, and the penalty for treason is death.”