an unmistakable menace of 'aggression,' if not absolute aggression itself."
And he further says:
"It should also be considered that when the fleet came to anchor off Charleston bar, it was well known that many other and larger vessels of war, attended by transports containing troops and surf boats, and all the necessary means of landing forces, had already sailed from Northern ports—"destination unknown"—and that very considerable time must have been requisite to get this expedition ready for sea, during the period that assurances had been so repeatedly given of the evacuation of the fort.
"It bore the aspect certainly of a manoeuvre, which military persons, and sometimes, metaphorically, politicians, denominate stealing a march. "
He says further on:
"It was intended to 'draw the fire' of the Confederates, and was a silent aggression, with the object of producing an active aggression from the other side,"
This very cautious statement from this Northern writer, clearly makes the Lincoln Government the real aggressor, under the principle before enunciated by Mr, Hallam.
Mr. Williams, the Massachusetts writer before quoted from, says:
"There was no need for war. The action of the Southern States was legal and constitutional, and history will attest that it was reluctantly taken in the last extremity, in the hope of thereby saving their whole constitutional rights and liberties from destruction by Northern aggression, which had just culminated in triumph at the Presidential election by the union of the North against the South."
And he says further on:
"The South was invaded, and a war of subjugation, destined to be the most gigantic which the world has ever seen was begun by the Federal Government against the seceding States, in complete and amazing disregard of the foundation principle of its own existence, as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, that 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,'
