From his dreams of music and poetry and from the ideal he had formed of study at Heidelberg, Lanier was awakened by the guns of Fort Sumter and by the agitation everywhere in Georgia. At Milledgeville he heard some of the great speeches made for and against secession, for, from November to January, the conflict throughout the State and especially in the capital was a severe one. He himself, like his father, hoped that the Union might be preserved, but the forces of discord could not be stayed. The people of Macon, on November 8, 1860, passed a declaration of independence, setting forth their grievances against the North. When secession was declared in Charleston on December 1, a hundred guns were fired amidst the ringing of bells and the shouts of the people. At night there was a procession of fifteen hundred people with banners and transparencies.* When on January 16 the Georgia convention voted to secede from the Union, Milledgeville was in "rapturous commotion". "Tears of joy fell from many eyes, and words of congratulation were uttered by every tongue. The artillery from the capitol square thundered forth the glad tidings, and the bells of the city pealed forth the joyous welcome to the new-born Republic."

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* Butler's `History of Macon'.
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Lanier afterwards, in "Tiger Lilies", described the war fever as it swept over the South. "An afflatus of war was breathed upon us. Like a great wind it drew on, and blew upon men, women, and children. Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts, conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeals of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms. This wind blew upon all vanes of all the churches of the country and turned them one way, -- toward war. It blew, and shook out as if by magic a flag whose device was unknown to soldier or sailor before, but whose every flap and flutter made the blood bound in our veins. . . . It arrayed the sanctity of a righteous cause in the brilliant trappings of military display. . . . It offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties, -- of church, of state; of private loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity, of social ties."*

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* `Tiger Lilies', p. 119.
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It does not fall within the province of this book to discuss the issues that led to the Civil War, -- the questions of secession and slavery. In 1861 they had ceased to be debated in the halls of Congress; all the Southern people were being merged into a unit. Ardent opponents of secession, like Alexander H. Stephens, threw in their lot with the new Confederacy; States like Virginia, which hesitated to disrupt a Union with which they had had so much to do, were as enthusiastic as the more ardent Southern States; old men vied with young men in their military ardor. Scotch-Irish opponents of slavery marched side by side with the Cavaliers, to whom slavery was the very corner-stone of a feudal aristocracy. The fact is, the whole South was animated by a passion for war. To young men like Lanier the Southern cause was one of liberty, of resistance to despotism and fanaticism, of the protection of homes. He who would understand their point of view must read such war lyrics as "Maryland, My Maryland" and Timrod's "Ethnogenesis", or enter sympathetically into the lives of that youthful band of Confederate soldiers all of whom were afterwards to become distinguished in the field of letters, -- Timrod, Hayne, Cable, Maurice Thompson, and Lanier.

It was not given to many men on either side to divine the true issues of the war. Lanier afterwards rejoiced in the overthrow of slavery, and knew that it was the belief in the soundness and greatness of the American Union among the millions of the North and of the great Northwest which really conquered the South. "As soon as we invaded the North," he said, "and arrayed this sentiment against us, our swift destruction followed." In a note-book of 1867 he pointed out with touches of humor the folly of many of the ideas formerly held by himself and other Southerners. He is writing an essay on the Devil's Bombs, "some half-dozen of which were exploded between the years 1861 and 1865 over the Southern portion of North America with widespread and somewhat sad results: namely, a million of men slain and maimed; a million of widows and orphans created; several billions of money destroyed; several hundred thousand of ignorant schoolboys who could not study on account of the noise made by the shells; and a large miscellaneous mass of poverty, starvation, recklessness, and ruin precipitated so suddenly upon the country that many were buried beneath it beyond hope of being extricated." This universal tragedy he attributes in part to the conceit of the Southern people. He himself became "convinced of his ability to whip at least five Yankees. The author does not know now and did not then, by what course of reasoning he arrived at this said conviction; in the best of the author's judgment he did not reason it out at all, rather absorbed it, from the press of surrounding similar convictions. The author, however, was also confident, not only that he personally could whip five Yankees, but ANY Southern boy could do it. The whole South was satisfied it could whip five Norths. The newspapers said we could do it; the preachers pronounced anathemas against the man that didn't believe we could do it; our old men said at the street corners, if they were young they could do it, and by the Eternal, they believed they could do it anyhow (whereat great applause and `Hurrah for ole Harris!'); the young men said they'd be blanked if they couldn't do it, and the young ladies said they wouldn't marry a man who couldn't do it. This arrogant perpetual invitation to draw and come on, this idea which possessed the whole section, which originated no one knows when, grew no one knows how, was a devil's own bombshell, the fuse of which sparkled when Mr. Brooks struck Mr. Sumner upon the head with a cane.

"Of course we laugh at it NOW, -- laugh in the hope that our neighbors will attribute the redness of our cheeks to that and not to our shame. . . . The conceit of an individual is ridiculous because it is powerless. . . . The conceit of a whole people is terrible, it is a devil's bombshell, surcharged with death, plethoric with all foul despairs and disasters."