Scott’s inaccurate report gave Buchanan additional reason for the inaction which was his basic thought. He says, in his _apologia_, that “to have attempted to distribute these five companies in the eight forts of the cotton states and Fortress Monroe in Virginia, would have been a confession of weakness.... It could have had no effect in preventing secession, but must have done much to provoke it.”[143] The first part of this statement would have been true had these five companies been the only force available; the second, on the supposition that the President meant that any attempt with a force reasonably large would have provoked secession, was a short-sighted view. To garrison the forts could not have been more obnoxious than to put them in a state of defence. At any time before the secession of a state they could have been garrisoned without bringing on actual conflict. The statesmen of the South were well aware that an attack upon an armed force of the United States, before secession, must place them irretrievably in the wrong. South Carolina did not secede until December 20th. To resist the sending of troops before this date to any of these forts would have been unqualified treason, and for this no one in the South was prepared. The safety of the secession movement, the extension of sympathy throughout the South, rested very greatly upon strict compliance with the forms of law and with the theories of the Constitution held by that section. At least one ardent secessionist, Judge Longstreet, recognized this when he appealed to South-Carolinians to refrain from any act of war; “let the first shot,” he said, “come from the enemy. _Burn that precept into your hearts._”[144] It was impossible that the Southern leaders should place themselves, or allow their people to place them, in the attitude of waging war against the Union while even in their own view their states still remained within it. There was, too, still a very large Union sentiment in the South, though finally swept into the vortex by the principle of going with the state, which would not have been averse to a determined action on the part of the President and might have upheld it, as in 1833. Such vigor would have given this sentiment a working basis, through the evidence that the Federal authority was to be upheld; and it would have caused a pause even in the least thoughtful of the secessionists had they felt that their coast strongholds were to be held and all their ports to be in the hands of the enemy. In the dearth of manufactures in the South, the holding of their ports was an essential to Southern military success. Their closure by blockade was equally an essential to the success of the North. The strategy of the situation was of the clearest and most palpable, and with their coast forts in Union hands warlike action on the part of the South is not conceivable. One can thus understand the importance of spreading the reiterated statements of “intense excitement” and “danger of attack” in the event of reinforcement; statements which, in the circumstances, must be regarded, if the phrase may be used, in the nature of a gigantic and successful “bluff.”