For four long years the unconquerable Sumter had battled with the powerful Federal navy, and for two hundred and eighty days the iron had hailed steadily upon her. Her defense during the Great Rebellion of 1776-1783 had been glorious, but these tired men in gray had far excelled that record of bravery. In the first war the heaviest cannon used was a twenty-four pounder; in this, the lightest was a twenty-four pounder, and the heaviest went far into the hundreds. When her walls were battered down her garrison burrowed in the sand, and they kept back the great ironclads that would have done harm to the cradle of secession. But at last the day came when men saw that the end was near, and General Beauregard issued orders for the evacuation of the city. Grant and Thomas and Sherman had each in his own way saved the Union. General Lee, whom Europe was comparing with Napoleon for generalship, and Gustavus Adolphus for religion, could not with a few thousands any longer beat back the multitude of his enemies. So Charleston knew that she had striven and lost. Colonel Masters, sitting in his office on the evening of that fateful seventeenth of February, 1865, was taking up the foundations of his soul and repairing each worn and battered stone. His eyes were fixed with a look of infinite sadness on the battle flag of the Confederacy, and his thoughts were on the Great Cause. It was not the question of surrender or not surrender that had made his eyes fade so during the last two years of woe just passed; nor was it any sharp animosity against the Federal government or the Stars and Stripes. These were both parts of him, the first and greater part, and only because they symbolized the things he loved had he dethroned them in his heart. Neither had he forgotten how, beneath the great eagle, he had led the Palmetto boys at Churubusco, nor how long men had called him the beloved president of the New England Society. Nor had he been turned aside by any love for slavery, which he had considered, since first he left fair Sudbury and looked last upon the Wayside Inn, as both morally and economically injurious. Nevertheless he loved the Great Cause.