The rejoinder of the Confederate Commissioners to Mr.Seward was in a threatening tone, upbraiding him with bad faith, and advising him that "Fort Sumter cannot be provisioned without the effusion of blood;" reminding him also that they had not come to Washington to ask the Government of the United States to recognize the independence of the Confederacy, but for an "adjustment of new relations springing from a manifest and accomplished revolution." Up to this time there had not been the slightest collision between the forces of the Confederacy and the forces of the Union.

The places which had been seized, belonging to the Federal Government, had been taken without resistance; and the authorities of Montgomery appeared to a great many Southern people to be going through blank motions, and to be aping power rather than exercising it.

Their defiant attitude had been demoralizing to the public sentiment in the North, but their failure to accomplish any thing in the way of concession from the National Government, and their apparent timidity in refraining from a shock of arms, was weakening the Disunion sentiment in the States which composed the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated with great pomp and pretension in February, and now April had been reached with practically nothing done but the issuing of manifestoes, and the maintenance of a mere shadow of government, without its substance.

The Confederates had as yet no revenue system and no money.