The election of November 1860 was unlike any in living memory.
Across the United States, men crowded into taverns and courthouses, waiting with bated breath as news sheets printed the tallies.
When the results became clear—Abraham Lincoln had carried the North with scarcely a single southern vote—the country seemed to split overnight, even with the politicians themselves having done all they could to not fan the smoldering flames, and incite the war itself.
In Boston and Chicago, fireworks burst in celebration.
In Charleston and Montgomery, men spoke of betrayal, of tyranny, of a Union no longer theirs.
For years the question of slavery had pulled the nation taut, but Lincoln's victory was the final snap.
The South declared that it could not endure under a president who would not defend its "peculiar institution."
Secession, once muttered in pamphlets and speeches, became a clarion call.
By December, South Carolina announced its departure from the Union.
Within weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed.
State conventions met in fevered halls, their galleries crowded with planters and militia officers, all urging that bonds with Washington be cut.
In Richmond, a planter remarked:"The North has elected its president; now the South must elect its destiny."
The mood was not unanimous.
Unionists still fought to hold ground in border states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia.
But the fire-eaters had gained momentum too strong to halt.
By February 1861, delegates from the seceded states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama.
There, beneath banners hastily sewn and rifles stacked in corners, the Confederate States of America was proclaimed.
Jefferson Davis was named its provisional president, his face grim as he swore his oath.
"The South seeks not conquest,"
he declared,
"but independence, just as our forfathers wanted. We wish only to be left alone."
Yet every man in that hall knew the North would not let them go quietly.
Washington, meanwhile, seethed.
Lincoln had not yet even taken office when President Buchanan's government found itself powerless.
Federal forts and arsenals across the South were being seized by state militias.
In Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Savannah, northern loyalist soldiers were driven out under banners of the new Confederacy.
The greatest prize yet unconquered was Fort Sumter, a brick bastion guarding Charleston Harbor.
Inside, Major Robert Anderson and his garrison clung stubbornly to their post, flying the Stars and Stripes even as South Carolina militia ringed them with cannon.
For weeks, all eyes fixed on Charleston.
Would the fort fall by starvation?
Would Washington reinforce it?
Would the Confederacy dare fire the first real shot in agression?
While the nation held its breath, life in the South transformed.
Militia musters swelled with volunteers.
Boys too young to shave shouldered muskets beside grizzled veterans of Mexico.
Courthouses overflowed with speeches promising honor, liberty, and resistance to "Northern aggression."
Planters pledged their fortunes.
Blacksmiths hammered iron into bayonets day and night.
Newspapers printed hymns and fiery sermons.
Churches rang with calls to defend hearth and home.
In every town, tailors stitched grey uniforms—at first haphazardly dyed, some brown or butternut, others almost blue, but all meant to mark the men of the South as a people apart.
And among these volunteers, though few recognized it, marched men of another kind.
The summoned riflemen had lived quietly in the plantations and backwoods of Dixie for months now.
They trained in secret, drilling in fields under the guise of militia practice.
Their weapons were kept hidden in barns and sheds, their discipline sharper than any county levy could boast.
To their neighbors they were farmhands, laborers, immigrants from across the Atlantic. But within the System, they were soldiers bound to Elias's unseen hand.
When Fort Sumter's guns finally thundered in April 1861, it was as though the world itself shifted.
Charleston awoke to the roar of artillery as Confederate batteries opened fire.
Shells screamed across the harbor, bursting against the fort's walls in showers of brick and flame.
For thirty-four hours, the bombardment raged.
On April 13, the garrison surrendered.
Not a single man had been killed in combat, yet the impact was greater than any bloody field could have achieved.
The flag of the United States was lowered from Fort Sumter's battered ramparts, and the banner of the Confederacy raised in its place.
The South exulted.
Church bells rang.
Men embraced in the streets, shouting that the first battle of independence had been won.
But in the North, the effect was fire poured on dry tinder.
Lincoln, sworn into office scarcely a month before, now called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the rebellion.
His words rang like iron across every Northern city: the Union would not be dissolved.
The die was cast.
What had begun as secession was now war.
The riflemen heard the news within hours, passed along by whispers in Charleston taverns, shouted in the streets of Montgomery, carried on horseback across the countryside.
But even before their neighbors spoke of it, they had received the message in a way no man of the age could comprehend.
Across the invisible link of the System, the word traveled like lightning.
Fort Sumter has fallen.
The war has begun.
Each man felt it at once, the signal carrying not only words but urgency, like the tolling of a great bell.
In a plantation barn outside Savannah, men in grey uniforms stood to attention as their sergeant relayed the order aloud.
"The North will rise to avenge this defeat,"
he said, voice low but steady.
"The President calls for volunteers. They will march against us. And when they do, we march against them."
Murmurs ran through the ranks, not of fear but of grim anticipation.
For months some of them years they had waited, training in silence, pretending to be no more than common farmhands.
Now the mask would drop.
Through the System link, they sent confirmation back to Elias in Montenegro.
We are ready.
The South has need.
Awaiting orders to march.
The barn door opened.
Beyond lay the fields of Georgia, shimmering in spring sunlight.
Soon they would tramp across them, muskets on their shoulders, joining the swelling tide of men in butternut and grey.
They were not Confederates by birth.
They bore no family names in the South.
But in their discipline, in their firepower, in their silent bond to Elias, they would fight as if the cause were their own.
The war had begun, and the shadow army was ready.