Rusty and Non-Sequitur firing away at 50 yards in 2007!
Well, well... thanks so much!
It's always a delight to read rusty's work -- he is sometimes wrong, but seldom if ever inaccurate -- and here going at it guns-ablazing with our "late" colleague, Non-Sequitur, and all the way back in 2007.
That's almost before my time... ;-)
In summary, what their debate shows is that my basic ideas are correct: there is no detailed breakdown of the rate of state militia mobilizations in late 1860 and early 1861 -- before Lincoln's inauguration.
All we have are bits and pieces of data, here and there, which suggest but do not confirm what was happening "behind the scenes."
For example, we know that in early November 1860 -- five weeks before declaring secession -- the South Carolina legislature authorized raising a 10,000 man army.
This was almost certainly the first mobilization in the country, and came at a time when the entire US Army was circa 16,000 mostly scattered in small posts out west.
We do not have data from other seceding states, but surely it's safe to suppose they followed South Carolina's lead, in raising militias along with declaring secession.
This could lead us to conclude that by the time Texas declared its secession on February 1, 1861, the seven original Confederate states were raising militias perhaps 70,000 strong.
But that is surely inaccurate because first we have to ask: what were all those state militias like before the secession crisis, let's say, in 1859?
How big were they, were they fully armed and trained?
Surely we have to assume that all those states had some militia back in 1859, and that at least some small part of it was armed, trained and ready to be deployed if needed.
So the question for those four months -- between Lincoln's election on November 6, and his inauguration on March 4 -- is: what increases and improvements did various states make to the size and readiness of their militias?
Answer: we don't know.
Nor do we know much about the rates at which the national governments filled their authorizations for 100,000 Confederates (March 6) and 75,000 Federal troops (April 17).
I have one report saying the Confederacy had 60,000 men by April 17, plus we have several reports showing the arrivals of very small Union units in Washington within a couple of weeks after Lincoln's April 17 call-up.
Nothing suggests there was a vast build-up of Union forces in the months before Fort Sumter.
Indeed, everything we do know suggests that in every step of the way from peace in 1860 to war in 1861, Deep-South slave-holding secessionists lead the way, and long-suffering Northern Unionists only reluctantly tried to match them.