A Northerner who visited Charleston that winter found that he was greeted without any particular hostility: the people he talked with all asked if the North really intended coercion and closed by saying that everyone in South Carolina hoped for a peaceful separation—peaceful, but of course a separation. He looked on with interest at the drill of the home guard, a modestly uniformed assortment of elderly men, some of them with white hair, and was told that this was a volunteer police force, raised to overawe the Negroes during the absence on military service of most of the city's young men. One Charlestonian explained that the illiterate Negro slaves, knowing nothing of anything that happened ten miles away from them, had somehow caught on to the fact that big things were stirring in the land. . . . "Our slaves have heard of Lincoln—that he is a black man, or black Republican, or black something—that he is to become ruler of this country on the fourth of March—that he is a friend of theirs and will help them." Hence it was essential for the state to establish its independence, so that the black folk would know that this legendary Lincoln could do nothing for them; essential, as well, for the home guard to come out and drill, while the younger men manhandled the big guns out in the marshes.⁵

So the winter wore away: guns firing harmlessly, officers exchanging dignified notes, elderly guards drilling under the Carolina sun, Negroes mysteriously hearing something, amateur soldiers toiling to learn the cruel skills of a new profession—and nothing irrevocable was actually happening. But now the pace was quickening, and it would never go any more slowly. Lincoln had made up his mind and sent his message, Secretary Toombs had voiced his grim doubts, Davis had come to his own conclusion and sent a message of his own—and on the night of April 8 the steamer Baltic left her New York wharf, dropped down the bay, and anchored until dawn just inside of Sandy Hook. The warships and tugs had gone on ahead, separately. Baltic would sail in the morning, there would be a rendezvous off the Charleston bar, and it was conceivable that the Sumter garrison would get fresh provisions.

Gustavus Fox, aboard Baltic, had few doubts about his mission, several doubts about Major Anderson. When he visited Fort Sumter, he had supposed that he would find a straightforward soldier, thinking only of his soldierly duty and hoping his government would send him help in time. To such a man Fox would have told everything he knew— about the projected relief expedition, about the eddying cross-currents in Washington, about Lincoln himself. But he felt that he had found a man who was "on the other side, politically as well as in a military point of view"; as a Massachusetts-born Unionist, Fox could neither understand nor sympathize with the American of conflicting loyalties.⁸

Anderson, whose loyalty to the Federal government never wavered for a moment, had doubts of his own. He doubted that the relief expedition would work, and he wrote to the War Department: "I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned." He felt that Washington should have told him about it earlier; Fox had done no more than hint at it, and Lamon had convinced him that the thing would not be tried. "We shall strive to do our duty," said the major, "though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is thus to be commenced."⁷

One man who had no doubts was Beauregard. He was a soldier whose loyalty lay with his duty. He had come to Charleston to form what he called "a circle of fire" around Fort Sumter; the circle was formed, and he would set it aflame whenever he was told to do so, content to follow the destiny of his state. To a Northern friend he wrote that his state had called on him for his services; he had given them, "not through a false ambition or a desire to see my name (badly spelt) in print, but because I consider it my solemn duty." He hoped sooner or later to be able to retire to a farm near New Orleans, with his family, his books and a few friends around him. Meanwhile, "whether this revolution results in peace or war—I will take as my only guide a clear conscience and a fearless heart."⁸ Now he had his orders from Secretary Walker, and he would carry them out.

Another man untroubled by doubts was Roger Pryor, the Virginia Congressman, who came down to Charleston, was serenaded on the evening of April 10, and spoke with unrestrained passion to the serenaders who stood in the street in the spring dusk under his hotel balcony.

"Gentlemen, I thank you, especially that you have at last annihilated this cursed Union, reeking with corruption and insolent with excess of tyranny," cried Pryor. "Thank God, it is at last blasted and riven by the lightning wrath of an outraged and indignant people. Not only is it gone, but gone forever." South Carolina had taken the lead, but Virginia would surely follow. A great storm of cheers arose when Pryor shouted his words of advice: "I will tell you, gentlemen, what will put her in the Southern Confederation in less than an hour by Shrewsbury clock—strike a blow! The very moment that blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South."

The news that Sumter was to be reinforced was out, and words like Pryor's were what Charleston wanted to hear. At midnight alarm guns were fired from Citadel Square, signal for the reserves to assemble, and all night long there were the beating of drums and the tramping of feet as company after company formed up—in the open streets, armories being lacking—and moved off to their posts. It was reported that a United States fleet lay off the bar, in the windy dark, and signal lights were seen, or were believed to have been seen, atop Fort Sumter.⁹

On the morning of April 11—cloudy, with a mild breeze, although a heavy swell out at sea kept Captain Fox's steamer tossing most uncomfortably on its way down from New York—Beauregard set about the composition of the formal demand for Fort Sumter's surrender. He had it finished by noon, and soon after that a boat with a white flag shoved off from a Charleston wharf and headed for the fort. It carried two of Beauregard's aides—Colonel James Chesnut, until December a United States Senator from South Carolina, an aristocrat of aristocrats, whose wife was keeping a diary that would be famous; and Captain Stephen D. Lee, a West Point graduate recently resigned from the United States Army, a man who would win fame and high position as a Confederate officer. With them was Lieutenant Colonel James A. Chisholm, aide-de-camp to Governor Pickens. In due course the boat reached the fort. The officers came on the wharf and were taken inside, and to Major Anderson they gave General Beauregard's message.

During the war that was about to begin, various generals would write demands for surrender. This document, however, had a tone all of its own. It had the dignity and the odd, formal politeness of an age that was ending; it was, furthermore, pure Beauregard from start to finish, as if it had been written partly to make a demand on Major Anderson, partly to satisfy Beauregard's own sense of what was correct, and partly for the appraisal of history. It might have been a restrained argument addressed to a wayward friend rather than a trumpet blast announcing violence. It read:

"Sir: the Government of the Confederate States has hitherto foreborne from any hostile demonstration against Fort Sumter, in the hope that the Government of the United States, with a view to the amicable adjustment of all questions between the two Governments, and to avert the calamities of war, would voluntarily evacuate it.

"There was reason at one time to believe that such would be the course pursued by the Government of the United States, and under that impression my Government has refrained from making any demand for the surrender of the fort. But the Confederate States can no longer delay assuming actual possession of a fortification commanding the entrance of one of their harbors, and necessary to its defense and security.

"I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter. My aides, Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee, are authorized to make such demand of you. All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may select. The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down."¹⁰

The three Southern officers waited alone for perhaps an hour, while Anderson called his officers together, read the message to them, and asked for their comments. The officers said about what they could have been expected to say, and no one bothered to make a record; they were professional soldiers in a fort which they had been ordered to keep, and to surrender on demand would have been unthinkable. Major Anderson composed a reply to General Beauregard. Like the letter he had just received, what the major wrote had dignity, courtesy, and firmness, and yet there was in his note a flavor faintly odd—as if his voice, had he been saying this instead of writing it, would have quavered just a little.

"General," wrote Major Anderson, "I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance. Thanking you for the fair, manly and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me, I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Robert Anderson, Major, First Artillery, Commanding."

This letter was given to the Confederate officers, and they started back to their boat, Major Anderson walking with them. At the edge of the wharf he asked whether Beauregard would open fire at once, without giving further notice. Colonel Chesnut hesitated, then replied: "No, I can say to you that he will not, without giving you further notice." Anderson said he would take no action until he was fired upon; then, moved by the thought that had been preying on his mind for many days—the almost complete exhaustion of the fort's supply of food—he burst out: "If you do not batter us to pieces we will be starved out in a few days."

The remark seems not to have registered, right at first, and the Southern officers got into their boat. Then Colonel Chesnut did a double-take: if the major had said what the colonel thought he had said, there might be no need to open a bombardment. Quickly Colonel Chesnut asked Major Anderson to repeat his last remark. Major Anderson did so, and Colonel Chesnut asked if he might include this in his report to General Beauregard. The major was not enthusiastic about having that casual remark put in a formal report, but he said that he had stated a fact and the colonel could do as he liked.¹¹

Like a good subordinate, Beauregard passed the whole business on to the Confederate Secretary of War, telegraphing the text of Anderson's written response and adding the remark to Colonel Chesnut. To show that he wanted Montgomery to say whether the bombardment should be called off, Beauregard ended his telegram with the single word: "Answer."

Jefferson Davis was perfectly willing to call off the shooting, but he wanted something better than Major Anderson's offhand remark on the wharf. Beauregard was informed, in a telegram signed by Secretary Walker but undoubtedly composed by President Davis, that he had better get it in writing.

"Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter," said the telegram. "If Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the mean time he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable."

Neither Davis nor Beauregard could overlook the chance that somebody might be trying to pull a fast one. Major Anderson was saying that he would be starved out very soon, but while the major seemed to be a truthful man, Washington of late had been a hotbed of deceit and falsehood. It was known that food was on its way to Fort Sumter. Some sort of Yankee ships—warships, transports, or whatnot—were known to be cruising to and fro off the Charleston bar, and

Captain H. J. Hartstene, of the Confederate navy, had just said that in his opinion it was quite possible for these ships to send supplies to Major Anderson at night in small boats. All in all, this was no time for Southerners to be too confiding. To cancel the attack because Major Anderson was about to starve, and then to find that his larder had just been filled and that he could hold out indefinitely, would be a very poor way to begin the Confederacy's struggle for independence.¹²

Beauregard undertook to nail it down. He wrote another letter to Major Anderson, and at eleven o'clock on the night of April 11 the three aides got into their boat once more and started for Fort Sumter, reaching the wharf a little after midnight. Major Anderson took the letter they gave him and once more called his officers into council.

The only real question was the length of time the garrison could hold out, on the food that was available. One week earlier, Lieutenant Hall had made a tabulation. The fort then contained two-thirds of a barrel of flour, 5 barrels of hard bread, just under a barrel of rice, 100 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of coffee, one-sixth of a barrel of salt, 24 barrels of salt pork, 2 barrels of vinegar, 40 pounds of hominy grits, and half a barrel of corn meal. To eat this there were in the fort 15 commissioned officers (including 3 from the Corps of Engineers), 74 enlisted men, and 1 functionary listed as a mail carrier. There were also 43 civilian employees whom Major Anderson had been trying to send ashore but whom he was compelled to keep because the South Carolina authorities would not let him get rid of them—figuring, no doubt, that these men would serve the South by helping to consume the major's food. Most of the stuff Lieutenant Hall had listed was gone by now, and the best judgment Major Anderson could get was that the garrison might possibly hold out for five more days. On the last three of those days there would be no food whatever.

One more letter to General Beauregard, then: Major Anderson would evacuate the fort on April 15, if General Beauregard would furnish him with transportation, and Major Anderson would not before that date open fire—provided that the Confederates did not commit, or seem obviously about to commit, some hostile act against Fort Sumter or against the United States flag, and provided also that Major Anderson did not in the meantime receive new instructions or provisions from his government. This was reduced to writing, and the message was given to the Southern officers, who were waiting in one of the casemates of the fort.

Major Anderson's answer was of course no answer at all, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, since it really committed him to nothing, and Beauregard's aides did not even feel that they needed to make the long trip back to Charleston to get Beauregard's verdict. (Consistently with the pattern that had been followed all along, the final activating decisions would be made by remote subordinates, exercising authority that had been delegated down the long chain of command.) With Colonel Chesnut dictating, Captain Lee writing it down, and Lieutenant-Colonel Chisholm copying the reply as fast as Captain Lee got it down—they were a busy trio, as Chisholm admitted afterward, for a few candle-lit minutes there in the casemate—Major Anderson got his reply in five minutes: "By authority of Brigadier General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time." As the note carefully stated, it was then 3:20 on the morning of April 12.¹⁸

Since Major Anderson and several of his officers were present when Colonel Chesnut dictated all of this, the written reply was no surprise. Major Anderson studied it, and Captain Lee thought he was profoundly moved: "He seemed to realize the import of the consequences, and the great responsibility of his position." Major Anderson walked out on the wharf with the three Southerners and saw them into their boat. Shaking hands with them, he murmured: "If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next." The boat moved off in the darkness, and Major Anderson and his officers went through the fort, arousing the sleeping soldiers, telling them that the battle was about to start, and warning everybody to stay under cover until further notice; Anderson would not try to return the fire until daylight. Most of the officers went to the barbette to take a last look around.¹⁴

There were bonfires and torches going in all of the Confederate camps and batteries. Sumter was ringed by an almost complete circle of flickering lights, with darkness off to seaward; clouds hid the stars, and there was a hint of rain in the air. From batteries and camps came a jumble of far-off sounds, as soldiers fell in line for roll call, trundled guns into position, made all of the other last-minute preparations. In a Charleston bedroom Colonel Chesnut's wife waited in an agony of suspense. Her husband had told her what was going to happen; she looked out over the dark harbor with the twinkling lights on its rim, Ustening. . . .

The three aides went ashore at old Fort Johnson, where Major Anderson had once thought he could quarter the families of the married members of his garrison. A Confederate battery was there now, and the officers gave their orders to its commander, Captain George S. James, who had a seacoast mortar tilted at the proper angle; it was to be the signal gun which would tell the encircling troops, the city of Charleston, and the world at large that the most momentous bombardment in American history had begun.

Roger Pryor had gone out to the fort with the military aides, although he had remained in the boat while the others went inside. Now he came in to Captain James's battery, and the captain bowed to him and asked him if he would like to have the honor of firing the first gun. (The blow Pryor had been asking for was about to be struck. It would have the exact result he had predicted, pulling Virginia into the conflict and into the Confederacy, and into a long, tragic bloodletting. It would also make a true prophet out of Robert Toombs.)

Pryor seemed as emotionally disturbed as Major Anderson. His voice shook as he told Captain James: "I could not fire the first gun of the war," and Captain James passed the order on to Lieutenant Henry S. Farley. Then Pryor and the three aides got back into the boat and set off for Charleston, to make report to General Beauregard. Before the boat had gone very far, they told the oarsmen to stop rowing, and the boat drifted in utter silence for ten minutes while the men looked toward Fort Johnson. Lieutenant Farley was a little late, but it made no difference. At 4:30 there was a flash of light and a dull explosion as he fired the mortar. Arching high in the night, the shell could be traced by its glowing red fuse. A gunner on Morris Island thought it looked "like the wings of a firefly." It hung in the air, started down, and exploded squarely over Fort Sumter. The boat resumed its journey. In her bedroom, Mary Chesnut went to her knees and prayed as she had never prayed before.¹⁵

 

5. White Flag on a Sword

In the moment of its beginning the Civil War was an improbable spectacle to make the pulse beat faster. The guns flashed on the rim of the night like holiday fireworks, the fuses of the soaring shells drew red lines across the dark sky, and there was a romantic unreality to the hour of long-awaited action. The young men who fired the cannon, like the people in Charleston who stood on the water front, leaned out of windows, or climbed to the house tops to watch, felt that something great was beginning and they were glad to be part of it. Hard knowledge of war's reality would come later; at the hour of its dawn, with a new day's light coming in from the open sea, and a thin haze rising to soften the hard outlines of fort and city and mounded batteries, the war had an incredible and long-remembered beauty.

Beauregard's men had been on the alert since midnight. By the guns little pyramids of shells had been built. In the hot-shot furnaces fires had been lit, so that solid shot could be heated and driven like glowing coals into the woodwork of Major Anderson's stronghold. Officers who had been told what the schedule was kept looking at their watches while they waited for the signal gun. Along the sand dunes on Morris Island sentries peered out to sea, expecting to discover at any moment boatloads of armed Yankees; logically, a relief expedition would land troops on this island to storm the batteries so that ships might reach the fort undamaged, and the infantry was waiting. Beauregard had obtained and mounted searchlights of a sort, but these lit up nothing except the rumbling surf close inshore, and they were not being used. Somewhere out in the darkness there were Confederate picket boats, which would set off blue rockets if any hostile craft approached.¹

The flash and the report of the first shell sent a flutter of nervous movement through all of the batteries, as gun crews hurried to open fire, and there was much postwar argument about who fired next. (The veterans argued that Captain James's opening gun was not really the first gun of the war; it was merely a signal gun, and the next gun was the first one fired with intent to do harm. Captain James took no part in these arguments, because he was killed in action in the fall of 1862 at South Mountain, in Maryland.)

The next gun to be fired may have been one in Fort Moultrie, or it may have been another of Captain James's pieces, or it may conceivably have been one of the guns on Cummings Point, the northern tip of Morris Island, a scant three quarters of a mile away from Fort Sumter. Sentimentalists always insisted that it was a gun in the iron battery—a set of heavy-duty Columbiads protected by an armored shield, at Cummings Point—and said that it was fired by that legendary hero of the secessionist movement, Edmund Ruffin; and inasmuch as the war began in a stir of sentiment and returned its memories to a sentimental mist afterward, that story was very widely accepted, both then and later.

Ruffin was certainly present as a soldier that night, and he did fire one of the first guns. The old gentleman had presented himself to Captain George Cuthbert, of the Palmetto Guards, two days earlier, asking permission to volunteer—with certain conditions. He would be a gunner, but if the Yankees made a landing, he claimed the right to serve in the infantry that was to drive them back into the sea; and his term of service would expire once the Confederate flag floated over Fort Sumter. He was accepted, the oldest and surely the most appealing of all of Beauregard's soldiers on opening day.

A youthful volunteer who saw him could never forget the looks of him—an old man, his gray hair worn long and done up in a queue in the style of the eighteenth century; six feet tall, or close to it, slender and straight as an Indian brave, his uniform coat buttoned to his throat, joining his company with a musket in one hand and a carpet bag in the other, accepted by his comrades in arms as an ornament but taking his duties most seriously. The night before the action began, the rest of the company got together and agreed that Ruffin ought to fire the first gun, and when Captain Cuthbert told him about it, Ruffin was greatly pleased. He slept that night without removing his uniform, and when the drums called the men to action stations just before four in the morning, the old patriot hurried to his post. After the signal gun was fired,

Ruffin pulled the lanyard of his piece, firing the first shot from this particular battery; and if several guns in other emplacements fired before this battery did, the flavor of the legend was not harmed. Someone took a photograph of the old man in full uniform a day or so later, and it was circulated all over the South, a propaganda piece of immense power. They do not make old men much more fiery than Edmund Ruffin.²

He had no monopoly on patriotic ardor, and if there is a wild and unreal beauty to the first hours of the war, much of it comes from the spirit with which the intense Southerners went into action. Quite typical of the lot was boyish D. Augustus Dickert, who was a member of "Captain Walker's company, from Newberry, South Carolina," and who stood at the opposite end of the scale of ages; he was just fifteen, and he had been on his way to school one morning when Captain Walker's company marched past, all brass buttons, palmetto cockades, bright uniforms, and music, and he forgot about school and hurried off to enlist. When he first applied, he was rejected because he was too young—inside of three years the Confederacy would be reaching out for boys of fifteen, whether or no, but in the hour of its beginning there was youth to spare—but he went on to Charleston anyway, slipped past the guards to Morris Island, and made connections. He was put to work, along with all the others, building fortifications, used wheelbarrow and shovel for the first time in his life, and found that his excitement, his sense of being a part of something glorious and uplifting, survived even this drudgery. Now he was a unit in Beauregard's little army, helping to tighten the vise on the hated fort as the stars grew dim and the morning light slowly became stronger.⁸

The Confederate bombardment was heavy—by the innocent standards of April 12, 1861, anyway—and it was fairly effective, considering the fact that every shot was being fired by amateur gun crews. Some of the gunners tried to sweep the open parapet of the fort, firing too high at first but improving their aim as the daylight grew. Others tried to explode shells on or just over the open parade ground inside the fort, and still others attacked the solid masonry walls. Beauregard had laid out a routine in advance, and his men followed it. In Captain James's command, the opening mortar had hardly been fired when his engineers exploded a mine to destroy a house that blocked the field of fire of a battery the captain had posted on a little hill. The smoke and debris from this explosion had no sooner settled than this battery was in action. (Long afterward, men from this battery insisted that neither Fort Moultrie, Edmund Ruffin, nor anyone else fired before they did.) Beauregard's aides reached Beauregard with their formal report of Major Anderson's refusal to accept terms long after the firing had started, but it made no difference.

Fort Sumter itself, meanwhile, was strangely silent, firing not a gun in reply, and some of the Confederate gunners were disturbed—the Yankees ought to be firing back. The only sign of life from the fort as the full light of day came was the fact that the flag was flying. (It had been hoisted during the night, immediately after Colonel Chesnut had served notice that the shooting was about to start.) Anderson kept his men under cover throughout the early hours of the bombardment. Around seven o'clock they were given breakfast—salt pork and coffee. Then, at 7:30, the drums beat the assembly, and the men were paraded in spite of the intermittent explosions of Confederate shell. Anderson divided the garrison into three reliefs, or shifts, ordered specified batteries to be manned, and opened fire.⁴

In laying out his battle plan, Anderson was under difficulties. He had more guns than he could use; short of supplies, he was also woefully short of men, and he could neither maintain a proper volume of fire nor use his most powerful weapons. His only chance, actually, was to lie low as much as possible and try to hold out until Captain Fox's relief expedition reached him. (Its arrival, if indeed it showed up at all, would present a new set of problems, but they could be met when the time came.)

Fort Sumter itself was solid enough—brick walls five feet thick, rising forty feet above the water, designed to carry three tiers of guns. The two lower tiers were in casemates: that is, each gun was fully protected, in a roomy compartment of heavy masonry, firing through a comparatively small embrasure or gunport. The third tier was on top, on what military jargon of that day called the terreplein, or barbette, the guns completely in the open, firing over a parapet that was their only protection. Anderson had forty-eight guns in position, half of them in casemates on the lower tier, the rest mounted on the barbette; none had been put in the second tier, and the casemates there were bricked up. The casemate guns, unfortunately, were the weakest of the lot—32-pounders and 42-pounders, firing nothing but solid shot. The heavy Columbiads and eight-inch howitzers, which could fire shell and had much greater range and smashing power, were all on the barbette. Not all of the guns would bear on any proper target, and Anderson did not have nearly enough men to fire all of his guns in any event, even though most of the civilian workers who had had to stay in the fort agreed to carry powder and shot or to serve in the gun crews.

The major's biggest handicap was that he could not afford to have very many casualties. He had 128 men, forty-three of whom were civilians, and he had to figure that after a day or so of bombardment Beauregard might send out infantry in boats, after dark, to take the place by storm. For that kind of fighting the Confederates had a huge advantage in numbers; Beauregard commanded probably 7000 men, and with the war actually begun he could get reinforcements without difficulty. The Federals had done their best to get ready for him. The wharf was mined and could be blown to bits at a moment's notice, heavy shells converted to hand grenades were distributed behind the parapet, and various infernal machines—each of which had a keg of gun powder as its operating mechanism—were ready to be dropped on any intruders; all in all, the little garrison could give an assaulting party a very warm welcome. But it would be touch and go, at best, and if any appreciable number of Anderson's men became casualties the case would be utterly hopeless. No matter what happened the major had to keep his men protected.⁵

Now the only guns with which he could make any effective reply to Beauregard's fire were the Columbiads and howitzers on the open barbette. The Confederates were already showing a dismaying ability to explode shell just above the fort and they had at least seventeen mortars firing; it was as certain as anything could be that Yankee gun crews on the barbette would take a very hard beating. Anderson would lose men much more rapidly than he could afford to lose them if he tried to keep the barbette guns in action.

As a result, Anderson ordered all hands under cover; he would use only the casemate guns in the lower tier, and although this meant that he could fire nothing but solid shot and could hardly hope to silence any of the guns that were firing at him, it could not be helped. His gun crews would be pretty well protected; if Fox should try to bring in reinforcements—the topmasts of the Federal warships could be seen on the horizon, and Sumter's flag had been dipped to show that they had been recognized—then the heavy guns could be manned to beat down Confederate fire and make it possible for the reinforcements to get to the fort. Until then the barbette guns would be left all alone, loaded but unmanned.

(One minor nightmare that plagued the Federal officers was the thought that if armed men in boats approached the fort in pitch darkness, there would be no sure way to tell whether they were reinforcing Federals or attacking Confederates. It would be terrible to obliterate a party of friends; it would be fatal to let enemies get to close quarters unharmed. The war was not half a day old before men began to see that fighting a foe who speaks the same language as one's friends can present special problems.)

With Captain Doubleday in general charge, Anderson's first shift went on duty, and six of the lower-tier guns opened fire. The fire was almost completely ineffective. Shooting at the iron-clad battery on Morris Island, the Federals quickly discovered that their solid shot hit the shield and bounded off harmlessly, and after a time they left that target altogether and began shooting at Fort Moultrie. Here their luck was no better. Beauregard's engineers had given the old fort a protective coating of cotton bales and sand bags many feet thick, with more cotton bales used as shutters to close the embrasures between shots; nothing that Sumter's guns could do seemed to have the slightest effect. Doubleday's gun crews were hot and irritable, and the sight of a crowd of civilian spectators on the beach of Sullivan's Island, well out of the line of fire and enthusiastically pro-Confederate to the last man and woman, was more than two of the old regular army sergeants could bear. When no officer was around they swung two of their 42-pounders about and fired at this crowd. Luckily, their shots were high—they smashed into the Moultrie House, which was flying a hospital flag but which contained no wounded, no Confederate having yet been hit— and the crowd scattered in vast haste. Naturally enough, the Charleston papers next day discoursed on the barbarity of Yankees who shot at civilians and hospitals.⁶

There were other incidents. Once a veteran sergeant stole up to the barbette and, all by himself, fired every gun that bore on Fort Moultrie. He hit nothing, and he had to scamper back downstairs in a hurry before he could be detected, but the Confederates thought Anderson was beginning to use his heavy guns and shot at the parapet with everything they had. Another time two sergeants crept to the barbette and fired a ten-inch Columbiad at the iron battery on Cummings Point. It was a near miss; encouraged, they reloaded, and although it was impossible for the two of them to run the huge gun back into proper firing position, they tried one more shot. The recoil made the huge gun turn a backward somersault, and all seven and a half tons of it left its carriage and crashed halfway downstairs, almost mashing one of the sergeants. The two managed to creep away safely, and once more the Confederates swept the barbette with shell and solid shot. . . . Sergeants in the Sumter garrison, apparently, averaged fairly tough.⁷

Meanwhile, the fort was taking a bad pounding. On Morris Island the Confederates had an English Whitworth gun, a breech-loader of immense power, sent over as a gift by a South Carolinian who lived in London. This gun began to gouge big chunks out of the fort's southeast corner, showing an amazing capacity for destroying first-class masonry; luckily for the Federals it soon ran out of ammunition, or the wall would have been breached then and there. Shell and red-hot shot set the wooden barracks on the parade ground on fire, and the fire-fighting details were whistled into action. Seeing the rising smoke, the Confederates increased their rate of fire, and the men fought the flames while ten-inch shell burst overhead. The blaze was put out, rekindled, put out again, started again, put out once more; shell fragments wrecked water tanks that had been installed under the barracks roof, and the deluge helped quench the flames—and sent choking clouds of steamy smoke all through the casemates as an added trial for the men at the guns. Major Anderson noticed that leading the fire fighters in their dangerous work was Sergeant Peter Hart, doing his best to live up to the role Mrs. Anderson had chosen for him.⁸

The day wore away, Beauregard's guns chipping steadily at the fort, Anderson's guns replying ineffectively; and out at sea Gustavus Fox came steaming up in the liner Baltic and discovered that for all the good he could do he might as well have stayed in New York.

Fox had come down from Sandy Hook in a twisting gale, and early on the morning of April 12 he met the warship Pawnee and the revenue cutter Harriet Lane cruising on station a dozen miles east of Charleston harbor. When Fox said that he was going to reprovision Fort Sumter and asked for an escort, Commander Stephen C. Rowan, of Pawnee, refused to go along; his orders were to stand by and await the arrival of the more powerful warship Powhatan (long gone by now on her way to Pensacola, with impish David Porter on the quarter deck), and if he went blundering in on his own he might start a civil war. Neither Rowan nor Fox nor anyone else on the open sea knew that the shooting had already started.

Fox stood in toward the bar with Harriet Lane plugging along cheerfully in his wake, and he presently learned that Commander Rowan's scruples were out of date. The brisk wind brought him tag ends of ragged powder smoke, and the bumping echoes of the firing of great guns, and it was all too evident that the war had begun. The same thing dawned on Rowan before long, and he brought Pawnee in at full speed, calling out to Fox as his ship came abreast that he wanted a pilot—he was going to go into the harbor and share in the fate of his brethren of the army. Fox went aboard Pawnee and managed to persuade Rowan that the government expected no such sacrifice; he explained the orders that governed his own conduct, and the three ships hove to and waited for Powhatan. With that ship, Fox believed, he could do something about forcing an entrance, or sending in a small-boat expedition; without it, he could do nothing. The weather continued bad, with a high wind and a heavy sea. A number of merchant ships came up and anchored, awaiting the result of the bombardment; from Morris Island the cluster of masts made the Confederates think that a large Federal fleet lay just offshore, and Beauregard alerted the island command to be prepared to resist a storming party on the beaches that night.⁹

There would be no storming party, and Fox's sense of frustration kept rising. Baltic tossed restlessly on the swell all night, waiting for Powhatan; the soldiers aboard the liner were seasick, but they were made to practice getting in and out of small boats just the same, and Fox wrote admiringly of the behavior of the army's Lieutenant Robert O. Tyler, who helped organize the detail although he himself was as seasick as anyone. The morning of April 13 came in foggy, with the sea as ugly as ever; trying to get close in shore, Baltic ran aground briefly on Rattlesnake Shoal, but got off undamaged. From Pawnee's deck a huge column of black smoke could be seen rising from Fort Sumter, its base lit now and again by the flash of Anderson's guns. Fox concluded that there was no use waiting for Powhatan any longer, but he found that he could not go through with his small-boat program either; none of the tugs had arrived, and the naval officers all insisted that no open boats carrying any load at all could reach Fort Sumter in the prevailing seas.

U.S.S. Pocahontas came along shortly after noon, and Fox learned at last what had happened to Powhatan. Refusing to give up, he commandeered a schooner from among the flotilla of sea-going idlers that had collected, planning to build a night expedition around her; but his preparations had not advanced very far before the lookouts reported that Major Anderson's flag was no longer flying, and before dusk Fox learned that it was all over.¹⁰

In the fort, things had been going from bad to worse. The night had been uneasy, with sentries looking anxiously for approaching boats, hoping they could tell the difference between a relief expedition and a landing party; every ten minutes all night long a Confederate mortar would toss a shell into the fort, just to keep everybody on the alert. With daylight on April 13 the bombardment was resumed, and it seemed to the Federals that the Confederate fire was heavier than ever. Flames broke out again, the officers' quarters were destroyed, all of the casemates were full of blinding smoke, and the men at the guns wore wet rags over their faces, and staggered to the embrasures between shots for a breath of air. It seemed likely that the blaze would reach the magazine before long, and powder barrels were moved into the casemates; in the heavier bombardment this was no safe place, and some of the barrels were thrown into the harbor. At noon the flagstaff was shot down. A new one was improvised, and Lieutenant G. W. Snyder and Sergeant Peter Hart went topside and managed to fasten it to a gun carriage on the shell-swept barbette.¹¹

The Confederates saw the flag come down, and saw the heavy smoke clouds going up, and correctly deduced that Major Anderson was in trouble. Beauregard ordered up a small boat with a flag of truce, and sent his aide, Captain Lee (with Porcher Miles and Roger Pryor for company), out to the fort to ask the major if he needed assistance: a courtly offer of help to an enemy, and also a tactful way of inquiring whether the Federal should not now surrender. Captain Lee set out on his mission, saw the flag hoisted again, turned to go back to the shore, then noticed that the United States flag had been lowered and that a white flag had been hoisted. Once more he turned about and made for the fort, where he found himself taking part in an amusing, unimportant, and wholly characteristic little farce.¹²

During the height of the contest, while Lieutenant Snyder and Sergeant Hart struggled to get the flag flying, and the gun crews stumbled through the smoke to maintain some sort of fire, a cannoneer in a lower-tier casemate, going to the muzzle of his piece to reload, saw a strange fellow looking in the embrasure—a burly civilian with a swarthy, piratical face, red sash and sword belt incongruously belted about his middle, a naked sword with a white flag knotted about the blade gripped in one hand—altogether a wholly improbable-looking figure. This man announced that he was Colonel Wigfall, recently United States Senator from Texas, now an aide to General Beauregard; he wanted to see Major Anderson, and he wanted even more to get safely inside the fort because he was at the moment squarely in the line of Confederate fire—"Damn it, they are firing at me from Fort Moultrie." After a certain amount of discussion he was led to Major Anderson; the rowboat that had brought him out, manned by a white man and a colored boy, remained tied up at the wharf. Colonel Wigfall addressed the Federal commander with bluff heartiness:

"Major Anderson, I come from General Beauregard. It is time to put a stop to this, sir. The flames are raging all around you and you have defended your flag gallantly. Will you evacuate, sir?"

The major was ready to call it quits. Washington had specifically told him that a last-ditch sacrifice was not expected of him. He had defended his flag long enough to meet all requirements; his magazine might explode before long, his cartridges were nearly all gone, and with flames and glowing embers all over the place, it was impossible to make new ones, and, besides, the main gate had been blown in and a storming party could overrun the fort any time it cared to make the effort. Anderson said he would surrender on the terms originally proposed—that he be allowed to salute his flag and then, with all the honors of war, take his men and their personal property back to New York. Wigfall said that this was a deal: "Lower your flag, and the firing will cease. I will see General Beauregard and you military men will arrange all the terms." Anderson reflected that his men were at the point of exhaustion, and it seemed to him that Wigfall's coming was providential. Down came the United States flag, and up went the white flag of surrender.

At this point Captain Lee and his two civilian companions got to the fort. Presented to Major Anderson, Lee said that Beauregard had sent them to offer assistance, if assistance happened to be needed, and to find out what all of this raising and lowering of flags meant. Anderson, puzzled, explained that he had just surrendered to Colonel Wigfall, whereupon his three visitors exchanged baffled looks; then they explained that although Wigfall did belong to Beauregard's staff, he had not seen the general for two days and had come out to the fort strictly on his own hook. Anderson muttered: "Gentlemen, this is a very awkward business," which stated the case accurately; he had just surrendered to a man who had no authority either to demand or to receive a surrender. Anderson ordered the white flag hauled down and the national flag raised; the fighting would be resumed.¹³

In the end, though, things were arranged. Captain Lee suggested that everything be left as it was while they got in touch with Beauregard; Anderson wrote out his understanding of the terms on which he and Wigfall had agreed; the Confederates took this letter to the general and made explanation, and in two or three hours—white flag still flying, and all the guns silent—they came back and it was settled. The surrender was official, as of that moment, but on the next day Anderson could hoist his flag, salute it, haul it down again, and march forth to board one of Captain Fox's steamers. The fighting was over . . . there had been too much of it for this one seaport town to contain, and it had brimmed over the rim; it would run all across the South, and into the North as well, going on and on until nobody could see any end to it.

The liner Baltic drew too much water to come in over the bar, and so the steamer Ysabel was sent in to take off the garrison. Shortly after the noon hour on Sunday, April 14, the final ceremony was held, the men of the garrison looking glum, Major Anderson near to tears with emotion, Charleston harbor all crammed with boats full of people, local wherrymen doing a land-office business rowing sightseers past the fort at fifty cents a head. There would be this final salute . . . but things that were planned in connection with Fort Sumter always went awry.

The salute was being fired by one of the big guns on the barbette. Some burning fragment of a powder bag was caught by the wind and dropped on a pile of ready cartridges behind the piece, and there was a sudden explosion—and the only loss of life caused by the great battle of Fort Sumter took place here and now, twenty-four hours after the fighting had stopped. (One of the fantastic things about Fort Sumter was that about 4000 shells were fired altogether, without killing anyone on either side.) Private Daniel Hough, a regular artillerist, was instantly killed, and five other soldiers were wounded, one so gravely that he died a few days later in a Charleston hospital. Private Hough was buried in the fort, with a company of South Carolina volunteers presenting arms and a Confederate naval chaplain conducting services. Then the band struck up "Yankee Doodle," the United States troops marched out to the waiting transport, the Confederate and Palmetto flags soared to the top of the flag pole, and guns all around the harbor fired a jubilant salute. Beauregard came out to make formal inspection of the fort, along with Governor Pickens and other notables. Captain Lee, examining the place with the professional eye of a military engineer, found it badly damaged and estimated that it would cost at least $350,000 to make suitable repairs.¹⁴

Out at sea, the transports and the warships steamed north for Sandy Hook.

 

6. The Coming of the Fury

Dining with three cabinet members not long after the fall of Fort Sumter, Winfield Scott expressed complete confidence in Northern victory, but doubted that there would be an early end to the nation's troubles. For a long time to come, he said, it would require the exercise of all of the powers of government "to restrain the fury of the noncombatants."¹

This fury was an elemental force that swept through North and South in precisely the same way, and it was going across the land like a flame. It did not look like fury at first; it was wild, laughing, extravagant, armed with flags and music and the power of speech, groping insistently for heavier weapons. The coming of war had released it. Something unendurable had ended; the uncertainty and the doubt were gone, along with the need to examine mind and heart for unattainable answers, and a Boston merchant looked about him at the crowds, the waving banners, and the general jubilation and wrote: "The heather is on fixe. I never before knew what a popular excitement can be." The London Times's Mr. Russell, stopping in North Carolina on his way to Charleston, saw the same thing—"flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths," with men shouting so stridently for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy (to which North Carolina had not yet attached itself) that the bands playing "Dixie" could not be heard. Men slapped strangers on the backs, women tossed bunches of flowers from windows, and in Richmond a crowd paraded to the Tredegar Iron Works under a Confederate flag, dragged a cannon to the steps of the state Capitol, and fired a salute. Some fundamental emotion had slipped the leash; it would control both President Lincoln and President Davis, and yet at the same time it was a force which the two men themselves would have to control in order to make war.²

Dazzled by the overwhelming public response to the news that one flag had gone down and another had gone up, ordinarily sensible men gave way to uncritical vaporing. Youthful John Hay, the somewhat condescending ornament of the White House secretariat, looked at a company of untried Northern militia and wrote: "When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes—all for a principle—it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army." Hard indeed; particularly so since exactly the same sort of men were doing exactly the same things in the South for a diametrically opposed principle, creating boundless possibilities of their own. Leroy Pope Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, told a serenading crowd in Montgomery that the Confederate flag "will, before the first of May, float over the dome of the old capital in Washington," and he went on to say that if Southern chivalry were pushed too far, the flag might eventually rise over Faneuil Hall in Boston. The eminent German-American Carl Schurz wrote admiringly that "millionaires' sons rushed to the colors by the side of laborers," and correspondent Russell noted that barefooted poor whites in the deepest South were whooping it up for Confederate independence as loyally as the wealthiest planters.³

Through the fall and winter, events had seemed to move slowly, as if fate wanted to give men a chance to have second thoughts about what was being done. Now everything began to go with a rush, and what was done would be done for keeps. White House routine had gone about as usual on April 13, when Anderson was driven to surrender. Lincoln received visitors, signed papers, worried about patronage. The cabinet met briefly, but in the absence of conclusive news it could do very little. During the morning Lincoln met with a delegation from the Virginia secession convention. What this convention would inevitably do was strongly indicated by the news in the morning papers; Roger Pryor had cried "Strike a blow!" and the blow had been struck, once and for all. Still, there was time for a word from the President, and Lincoln had written out a brief statement: a cautious indication of future policy, saying much less than was on the President's mind.

If it proved true, he said, that Fort Sumter had actually been attacked, he would perhaps suspend the delivery of United States mails in the states that claimed to have seceded, for he believed that the commencement of actual war against the government justified and perhaps required such a step. He still considered all military posts and property in the seces-

 

sionist states to be Federal property, and he continued to stand by the policy laid down in the inaugural—to hold, occupy and possess such places. He would not try to collect duties and imposts by armed invasion of any part of the country, but at the same time he might conceivably land an armed force, in case of need, to relieve a fort along the borders. . . . The delegates went away as wise as when they came but probably no wiser.⁴

Lincoln would do a great deal more than he had told the Virginians that Saturday, because he clearly had concluded that the time for temporizing had gone. Whatever might or might not have been done, once the firing began at Fort Sumter, Lincoln was ready to make war. If the border states could stand the shock and would go along, well and good; if not, they could go where they chose. He would fight the theory and the fact of secession with all the power at his disposal, letting what had happened at Charleston stand as a declaration of war. On Sunday, April 14, when news that Anderson had hauled down his flag reached Washington, Lincoln met with his cabinet again, and talked to his military advisers, and on Monday morning he issued a proclamation —an announcement that the war was on, and a statement (as far as one could be made at this moment) of the policy that would guide him in the conduct of that war. It went to the country on April 15. After reciting the obvious fact that "combinations too powerful to be suppressed" by ordinary law courts and marshals had taken charge of affairs in the seven secessionist states, it announced that the several states of the Union were called on to contribute 75,000 militia "in order to suppress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed." It continued:

"I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long endured.

"I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union; and in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the object aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.

"And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.

"Deeming that the present condition of public affairs presents an extraordinary occasion, I do hereby, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, convene both Houses of Congress. Senators and Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at their respective chambers, at 12 o'clock noon, on Thursday, the fourth day of July, next, then and there to consider and determine such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand."⁵

This was clear enough, and it went substantially beyond the threat to suspend the mail service and reinforce beleaguered garrisons which he had mentioned to the Virginia delegation two days earlier. It was a flat announcement that the unbroken Union would be fought for, a promise that slavery would not be disturbed—the word "property" had a very specific meaning in those days—and a clear indication that this President would aggressively use all of his powers right up to the hilt. It was mid-April now, and Congress would not meet until early in July. Until then, Abraham Lincoln would be the government, free to act as he chose with no restraint except the knowledge that he would have to give Congress an accounting ten or eleven weeks later—by which time everything Congress did would be done under the incalculable pressure of wartime emergency.

As an experienced politician, Lincoln had looked to his fences before he acted. The Republicans were bound to support him; he was also assured that his decision to go to war would be publicly endorsed by Stephen A. Douglas, which meant that the Democratic party in the Northern states would support the war.

On Sunday evening Congressman George Ashmun, a Massachusetts Republican, called on Douglas at the Senator's home in Washington and urged him to go at once to the White House and tell the President he would do all he could to help him "put down the rebellion which had thus fiercely flamed out in Charleston harbor." Douglas demurred; Lincoln had been firing good Democratic office-holders, many of them friends of Douglas, in order to make jobs for Republicans, and, anyway, Douglas was not sure that Lincoln wanted any advice from him. Ashmun insisted and at last won Douglas over, with the help of Mrs. Douglas, and the two men went to the White House. Lincoln received them cordially, and read to Douglas the proclamation he would issue in the morning. Douglas endorsed it wholeheartedly, but told Lincoln to call out 200,000 men instead of 75,000. Reflecting on the bruises he had received in the Charleston convention at the hands of the cotton-state leaders, Douglas warned: "You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do." The President and the man who had opposed him then went to a map, and Douglas pointed to strategic spots that ought to be strengthened—Washington, Harper's Ferry, Fort Monroe, and the muddy Illinois town of Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. They parted at last, and Douglas wrote out and gave to the Associated Press a brief statement, telling the country that although he remained a political opponent of the President, "he was prepared to sustain the President in the exercise of all his Constitutional functions to preserve the Union and maintain the Government and defend the Federal capital."⁶ For a few months, at least, the Democratic party in the North would support the war, and in this third week of April it seemed that all of the North was an enthusiastic and patriotic unit. The heather was truly on fire. There were "war meetings" everywhere, mayors made speeches, citizens paraded, and military recruiting stations were swamped. State governors who had worried for fear they could not meet the enlistment quotas set by the War Department found they had many times as many applicants as the quotas would accommodate, and began to wonder how they could pacify all of the indignant voters who wanted to go to war and could not be accepted. City after city named committees of public safety, the committee members usually having the loftiest of motives and the haziest of ideas as to their duties. A Southern woman temporarily resident in New England wrote to friends that the intense fervor that was sweeping Massachusetts was not patriotism but simple hatred for the South, but she felt that these Yankees were in earnest whatever their motive, and she voiced a warning: "I would not advise you of the South to trust too much in the idea that the Northerners will not fight, for I believe they will, and their numbers are overwhelming."⁷ Sober businessmen of Cincinnati met and agreed that they would ship no more goods south— an agreement that languished and died in due course, for Cincinnati was to be an active supply depot for Confederate smugglers of contraband throughout the war.

But if the proclamation moved the North to a wild, almost discordant harmony, it knocked Virginia straight out of the Union and turned the war into a life-or-death affair for the whole nation.

Lincoln had said that to trade a fort for a state, Sumter for Virginia, might be an excellent bargain, although his efforts to drive such a bargain had been tardy and ineffective. Now both fort and state were gone, and their joint departure meant that the war would be long and desperate. Without Virginia the Southern Confederacy could not have hoped to win its war for independence; with Virginia the Confederacy's hopes were not half bad, and they would get even better when people realized that Virginia would come equipped with Robert E. Lee. American history has known few events more momentous than the secession of Virginia, which turned what set out to be the simple suppression of a rebellion into a four-year cataclysm that shook America to the profoundest depths of its being. Once the proclamation was out, Virginia's departure was almost automatic.

People in Richmond were celebrating the fall of Fort Sumter before they saw Lincoln's proclamation, and a mass meeting on April 15 resolved "that we rejoice with high, exultant, heartfelt joy at the triumph of the Southern Confederacy over the accursed government at Washington."⁸ In the midst of this jubilation came the news that the accursed government expected Virginia to provide three regiments of infantry for the purpose of destroying the joyously congratulated Confederacy. To a proud tidewater people who had seen Yankee coercion in the mere fact that the United States flag had been flying over a fort in South Carolina, this call for troops—this obvious, bluntly stated determination to make war—looked like coercion triply distilled and outrageously unbearable. Virginia's refusal to join the Confederacy during the winter had never meant anything more than a desire to wait and see, a thin hope that the deep South might yet get all it wanted without having to establish a brand-new nation. Having waited, Virginia now had seen; the thin little hope was dead; and Virginia would be out of the Union just as soon as the most meager formalities could be attended to.

Virginia's Governor Letcher gave abundant warning of what was to come when, on April 16, he sent Lincoln a reply to the request for militia.

"In reply to this communication," said the governor, "I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object—an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795—will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South."

As Governor Letcher felt, so felt most of the other border-state governors, and messages of angry defiance poured in on Lincoln as soon as his call for troops was received. From Kentucky, Governor Beriah Magoffin telegraphed: "Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states." Governor John W. Ellis, of North Carolina, wired that the request for troops was so shocking that he could hardly believe it to be genuine: it was both a violation of the Constitution and a "gross usurpation of power," he would have no part of it, and "you can get no troops from North Carolina." From Governor Isham G. Harris, of Tennessee, came the statement: "Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purpose of coercion, but 50,000 if necessary, for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brethren." Governor H. M. Rector, of Arkansas, said that his state would send no troops; the people of Arkansas would "defend to the last extremity their honor, lives and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation." And Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, of Missouri, refusing to join in "the unholy crusade," telegraphed to Lincoln that his call for troops was "illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.'"-' It had seemed of the first importance to hold the border states in the Union, but within the week following Major Anderson's surrender it looked as if the border might go over to the Confederacy en bloc. The nation that was going to war to preserve its unity might well find the war lost before it had fairly begun.

Most important of all was Virginia; and in Virginia, it quickly developed, the overwhelming majority of the people (east of the Blue Ridge, at any rate) felt precisely as Governor Letcher felt. Virginia's secession convention had never adjourned, and the call for troops galvanized it into quick action. On April 17 the convention passed an ordinance of secession. Technically, this would become effective only if a majority of the voters of the state ratified it at a special election called for May 23, but by now there was not the slightest chance that the voters would reject it and everyone took it for granted that Virginia had made an irrevocable decision. Until the action at Fort Sumter, there had been a good Unionist majority in the convention, but Delegate W. C. Rives wrote to a friend in Boston that "Lincoln's unlucky and ill-conceived proclamation" had caused an immediate reversal. The ordinance passed by a vote of 88 to 55, most of the pro-Union votes being cast by delegates from the western part of the state, beyond the mountains. Governor Letcher promptly issued a proclamation pointing out that seven states had already "solemnly resumed the power granted by them to the United States," asserting that Lincoln's call for troops was unconstitutional and a grave threat to Virginia, and summoning all of the state's volunteer regiments or companies in the state to stand by for an immediate call to active duty.¹⁰

The governor was moving fast, but the people of Virginia were moving even faster. Some of the military units Governor Letcher was talking about had not only assembled ahead of time but were on the move to smite the Yankees by the time he got out his proclamation. Henry A. Wise had been governor of Virginia at the time of the John Brown affair— had questioned the old man after the collapse of the uprising, and had in effect caused Brown to be convicted of treason and hanged—and the Fort Sumter crisis and what followed it turned his mind immediately to Harper's Ferry. On the evening of April 15, before Governor Letcher had even had time to make his defiant reply to Lincoln's demand for troops, Wise arranged a conference, in Richmond, of as many militia officers as he could find, and worked out a plan to get an armed force into Harper's Ferry to seize the government arsenal there. With this advance planning, a force of perhaps 1000 armed men was put in motion the moment the convention passed the ordinance of secession, and by the evening of April 18 this force was drawn up within four miles of the historic little town.

United States authority at the arsenal was represented by First Lieutenant Roger Jones and forty-two regular infantrymen. (By one of the remarkable coincidences common to this war, Lieutenant Jones was a cousin of Robert E. Lee.) It was utterly impossible for this company to stay there; not only were the Federals badly outnumbered, but Harper's Ferry (as other officers were to discover, later in the war) was practically indefensible anyway. The town lay at the bottom of a cup, with high mountain ridges on every side, and unless its garrison could hold all of these ridges, which would take a very large force, an assailant could shell the place into submission without much trouble. Jones set fire to the arsenal and armory that night and put his command on the road for Pennsylvania, and the next morning the Virginia troops marched in. The government buildings had been destroyed, but the machinery with which military rifles were made was not badly damaged, and it was promptly moved farther south to make arms for the Confederacy. Several thousand rifle barrels and gun locks were salvaged, and the Virginians settled down to hold Harper's Ferry and the country roundabout. In a short time they got a new commander—an ungainly professor from the Virginia Military Institute, a cold-eyed West Pointer who had fought in the Mexican War and who turned out to be a secretive and hard-boiled stickler for discipline; a colonel in Virginia's service by the name of Thomas Jonathan Jackson.¹¹

It had been just one week since Beauregard's guns opened on Fort Sumter, and already Virginia was in the war. Either Lincoln had discounted Virginia's action in advance, or (which seems much more probable) he had grossly overestimated the amount of Unionist sentiment in this and other border states. Neither Lincoln nor Seward had been able to see that this Union sentiment was purely conditional; it existed as long as no strain was put upon it, but when a real test came it fell apart. The emotional drive was all-important, and in this part of the country the Government of the United States, the very concept of the United States as a nation, could look like an interfering third party standing between a man and the object of his deepest loyalty. . . . The fury was on the land, and men all over America were responding to impulses that came up from the greatest depths.

Among them, Robert E. Lee.

Reaching his home, Arlington, at the beginning of March, Lee had reported to the War Department on March 5, immediately after the inauguration ceremonies were out of the way. He had been placed on waiting orders, which seems to have been General Scott's way of keeping him where he would be available for immediate use in case of emergency. (Of all the officers in the army, Lee was the one Scott regarded most highly.) On March 16 Lee was made colonel of the 1st U. S. Cavalry, an appointment which he promptly accepted. Since then nothing had happened. Lee had had a waiting period of approximately seven weeks—as odd a period, one would suppose, as his entire life contained. He had been educated for service in the United States Army and he had spent all of his life in that service; now the sections of the nation had drifted into war, and as a recently promoted officer in the army, Lee might expect to be called on to lead troops against the South. His own state, Virginia, had not seceded, and in Texas Lee had said that he would do what Virginia did. He had also said that he thought perhaps he would resign and "go to planting corn." Lee had waited at Arlington, hoping for the best.

When he first saw Scott—sometime between March 5 and the day he was given his promotion, apparently—he asked the old general what was going to happen; for his part, he said, he could not go into action against the South, and if that kind of action was coming, he wanted to know so that he could resign at once. Scott reassured him. This was at the time when Seward was talking conciliation, Lincoln's cabinet was almost a unit in opposing reinforcements for Fort Sumter, Lincoln seemed to be in no mood to force the issue, and Scott told Lee he believed there would be a peaceful solution. Lee clung to this assurance. Even on April 15, the day Lincoln issued his call for troops, Lee retained some shred of optimism. An Alexandria clergyman whom Lee visited that evening said that Lee "was not entirely in despair." Lee that night apparently voiced some belief that things would come out all right, for the minister wrote: "I hope his view may prove correct. But it seems to be against probabilities."¹²

The probabilities caught up with Lee almost immediately. On April 18, the day Virginia's troops were moving on Harper's Ferry, the day after the convention had voted for secession, Lee was called into conference in Washington by Francis P. Blair, Sr., who asked him point-blank if he would take command of the United States Army. Blair made it clear that he was asking this question with the full approval of President Lincoln. Afterward, Blair wrote that Lee expressed a certain devotion to the Union and said that he could not make up his mind without first consulting General Scott; Lee himself, after the war, said that he told Blair he could take no part in any invasion of the South, and he added that he went to see Scott simply to tell him what his decision had been. In any case, he called on Scott as soon as he left Blair and told him what had happened.

The meeting with Scott was brief. Lee told Scott that he was going to resign and admitted that the struggle was hard. He did not believe in secession, he said, and if he owned every slave in the South he would free them all if that would bring peace; but to fight against Virginia was not in him. Lee went back to Arlington. Two days later he wrote a formal letter of resignation and sent it to the War Department, asking that it be made effective at once.

Those two intervening days appear to have been days of emotional upheaval rather than of intellectual analysis. To his sister, Mrs. Anne Marshall, of Baltimore, Lee wrote that the whole South "is in a state of revolution" and that Virginia had been drawn into it. He himself could see no necessity for this state of things, but his course seemed clear: "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword." To his brother, Captain Sydney Smith Lee, of the Navy, he wrote in much the same vein; he had thought to wait until Virginia's voters had passed on the ordinance of secession, but the war had actually begun and he might at any moment be ordered to do things which he could not conscientiously do. Accordingly, "save in defense of my native State I have no desire ever again to draw my sword." The same phrase about drawing his sword only in defense of his native state had appeared in his letter of resignation addressed to Simon Cameron. In a letter which she wrote to friends at about this time, Mrs. Lee said: "You can scarcely conceive the struggle it has cost Robert to resign to contend against the flag he has so long honored disapproving, as we both do, the course of the North & South, yet our fate is now linked with the latter & may the prayers of the faithful for the restoration of peace be heard. . . . We shall remain quietly at home as long as possible."¹³

This would not be very long. Two days later a delegation sent by the Virginia authorities invited Lee to go to Richmond. He went at once, and on April 23 he was made commander of Virginia's armed forces. The time of waiting was over; Lee had not so much made up his mind as followed his heart. In this he was doing what most of his fellow Americans were doing.

In Boston, George Ticknor wrote to a friend in England: "We have been slow to kindle; but we have made a Nebuchadnezzar's furnace of it at last, and the heat will remain, and the embers will smoulder, long after the flames that now light up everything shall cease to be seen or felt."¹⁴

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

The Way of Revolution

 

1. Homemade War

The Southern Confederacy had been in existence a little more than two months, and in that time it had made much progress. By the middle of April it had acquired both a fort and a state which it had not had before. Its credit was good, subscriptions of $8,000,000 having been received on a national loan that asked for $5,000,000; a new and much larger issue would be launched very shortly. The Post Office Department was about ready to go into business despite a lamentable lack of proper stamps; courts had been set up in most of the states, and there would soon be a patent office, it being evident that the Yankees had no monopoly on the inventive genius. The Confederate State Department was already in action, and long before Sumter was fired on it had sent commissioners abroad to explain secession to the powers of Europe and (it was devoutly hoped) to win recognition and treaties of friendship, commerce, and navigation.

Significantly, the principal commissioner was William L. Yancey. The prince of fire-eaters was being sent far away from the nation he had done so much to create; he was entrusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions, not so much because anyone supposed that he had a talent for diplomacy—his enormous skill lay in the rough-and-tumble of American politics—as because he might be an embarrassment if he stayed at home. Leaders who could eat fire had served their turn. The destiny of the Confederacy now was in the hands of more moderate men who were prepared to emphasize the eternal logic and justice of Southern secession, ready to meet force with unmeasured force if need be but still abiding in the faith that reasonable men must eventually accept the Confederacy at its own valuation.

Yancey and his fellow commissioners, Pierre A. Rost, of Louisiana, and A. Dudley Mann, of Georgia, were to work especially on Great Britain. Secretary of State Toombs, himself a man of action who would soon find the dignity of his office too confining, had given detailed instructions. They were to reveal to the British statesmen the complete and undeniable legitimacy of the new Confederate nation; they were also to remind them that this nation was where most of Britain's cotton came from, and were to hint delicately that the supply would probably be cut off in case of a long war. It was hoped, in Montgomery, that this reasonable presentation would be enough. Editor Rhett, of Charleston, was complaining that Yancey ought to have authority to bait the net properly, offering to the British nation of shopkeepers irresistible trade concessions in return for a binding offensive and defensive alliance, but the government was playing a more sober game.¹

Davis's attitude was revealed in his address to a special session of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate states, called together after the long dispute at Fort Sumter finally exploded into actual war. "All we ask is to be let alone," he cried. The moment Lincoln showed himself ready to adopt a let-alone policy, "the sword will drop from our grasp and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce that can but be mutually beneficial." For the time being, however, the sword must be held. The Confederacy had 19,000 men in the field—at Charleston and at Pensacola, in Fort Pulaski below Savannah, in Fort Morgan at Mobile, and in Forts Jackson and St. Philip at the mouth of the Mississippi—and it was sending 16,000 more to Virginia. It was preparing to organize and equip an army of 100,000 men, and as long as the United States showed a desire to subjugate the South, "we will continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence and self government." But there could be no reasonable doubt of final success of the cause.²

Davis would have no fire-eaters setting the pace. A man of profound self-control, he would avoid the unpredictable violence of revolution; he would play this by the book. Both Presidents would, as a matter of fact, until it became impossible to play it that way any longer. One of the saddest facts about the nation's final plunge over the brink is that even after the fighting had actually started, both Davis and Lincoln responded to some dim, deeply held feeling that perhaps the point of no return had not really been passed, that there might yet by some miracle be a bloodless solution and a healing. Long afterward the Confederate President's wife, Varina Howell Davis, remembered how her husband took the news that Major Anderson had surrendered Fort Sumter. His first remark was that he was glad so little blood had been shed. Then, most strangely, he remarked: "Separation is not yet, of necessity, final. There has been no blood spilled more precious than that of a mule." And Lincoln, in this same month of April, talking to a group of "frontier guards" at the White House, said an equally unexpected thing: "I have desired as sincerely as any man—I sometimes think more than any other man— that our present difficulties might be settled without the shedding of blood. I will not say that all hope is yet gone."³ Separation not yet final, hope not yet gone . . . but each man had set himself a task which he would not give up, had taken a position to which he would cling with the most uncompromising tenacity. More than that: the immense emotion that was welling up from bottomless deeps in the hearts of people all over the country was stronger now than any President and would carry America beyond all formalities and restraints. The country had entered upon a revolution, even though it was not quite clear just who was making the revolution or whom the revolution was directed against, and it would at last wring from Lincoln the bitter cry (in which austere Davis might well have joined) that he could not claim to have controlled events but must admit rather that events had controlled him.

Revolution sets soldiers fighting civilians, and it can pick a city street for a battlefield. So it was now. This was civil war, a time of overthrow and destruction and rising savagery, and the first real fight came when a senseless riot went rolling across Baltimore, with men in uniform and men not in uniform stretched dead on the pavement after it had passed . . . and with a new forced draft applied to Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

The border states had been considered the key pieces in

the secession crisis, and in some ways Maryland was the most important of the lot. If Maryland went out of the Union (Virginia having gone already), the national capital would be wholly cut off and the government could be imprisoned by its foes, in which case the government would probably lose the war for sheer inability to function. At any cost whatever, the Lincoln administration had to keep Maryland in the Union—with a gun at the nape of the neck, if in no other way.

Cotton-state agents who came proselytizing for additions to the Confederacy in the weeks just after South Carolina seceded had a thin time of it in Maryland; the state listened politely but refused to respond. Although the Mason and Dixon line formed its northern boundary, Maryland was only half southern; it was Dixieland along the eastern shore, but it was straight Pennsylvania west of Baltimore, and Baltimore itself was partly a southern city and partly a trading center of the northern type, prospering because it was both a gateway to the Middle West and an outpost of eastern finance. In a time of civil war a state thus divided was certain to have trouble, and Maryland got its full share at a very early stage.

When Lincoln called for troops, Maryland's Governor Thomas H. Hicks, Unionist-minded but fully aware that very careful handling was called for, hurried to Washington and got from Secretary Cameron and General Scott a promise that Maryland's militia would be used only inside the state and in the District of Columbia. He passed this assurance on to the people of Maryland, and in a sober proclamation he warned that "the consequences of a rash step will be fearful" and urged everyone to refrain from words or deeds that might "precipitate us into the gulf of discord and ruin gaping to receive us." Maryland would furnish her quota of troops, giving the government a conditional but invaluable loyalty which might or might not last for the duration of the war.⁴

The trouble that Governor Hicks foresaw came almost at once. Washington needed troops, being almost totally undefended, and because Washington's only railroad connection with the North was the railroad line that came down from Baltimore, the troops Washington got had to cross Maryland. The first contingent reached the capital on April 18, the day the Harper's Ferry arsenal was lost; a detachment of 460 Pennsylvania volunteers, whose seeming unreadiness led John Hay to comment acidly on the "unlicked patriotism" that came in "ragged and unarmed," and a company of regulars brought from Indian-country posts in Minnesota. These came down from Harrisburg, were alternately hooted and cheered as they went through Baltimore, and reached Washington without incident, but their passing stung the sensitivities of the numerous Southern sympathizers in and around Baltimore. This transit of troops bent on coercion of the South was an outrage, and if there was any more of it, Baltimore's Southerners would take steps. Rumors of coming violence reached Washington, and Secretary Cameron warned Governor Hicks by telegraph that "unlawful combinations of misguided citizens" proposed to use force to keep troops from coming to Washington. This warning might have done some good, except that no one in the War Department told either Governor Hicks or Mayor George William Brown, of Baltimore, when the next contingent of troops was due to pass through Baltimore. The local authorities, who knew without being told by Cameron that something was likely to pop, thus lacked the one bit of knowledge that would enable them to take effective precautions.⁵

The next troops reached Baltimore on April 19; the 6th Massachusetts, a full-strength militia regiment which arrived on a special train, reaching the President Street station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore railroad a little before noon. There was, to repeat, no through rail connection with the Baltimore & Ohio line to Washington; as a makeshift, cars were hauled cross-town, one at a time, by teams of horses, along a street railway line that led to the Baltimore & Ohio's Camden Street station, and as these cars went trundling along the streets, the unlawful combinations of the misguided swung into action.

Moving as rapidly as possible—which was not, after all, much faster than a brisk walk—nine cars made the trip without serious trouble. The way was lined with hostile crowds, which quickly got larger and more unruly; there were jeers and hisses, stones were thrown, and emotional temperatures grew hotter and hotter, and at last people dumped sand on the track, piled anchors on top of the sand, and effectively blocked the right of way. Stranded at the President Street station were four companies of the regiment and the regimental band, perhaps 220 men in all. With them was an extremely unhappy body of embryonic soldiers from Pennsylvania; 800 men belonging to various military companies in Philadelphia, unarmed and lacking uniforms, not belonging to the state's organized militia, led by officers who had never been formally commissioned—a patriotic but utterly ineffective outfit, of no conceivable use in this crisis, hoping to get to Washington and to be of some service there. The band and the Philadelphians stayed at the railroad station, awaiting developments; the four companies of the 6th Massachusetts shouldered muskets and set out for the Camden Street station on foot.

The march began badly and ended in catastrophe. There were hostile crowds all along President Street, throwing stones, cheering for Jefferson Davis, uttering throaty groans for Abraham Lincoln, and denouncing uniformed Yankees. Someone in the crowd unfurled a Confederate flag, and the shower of stones increased. Mayor Brown got to the scene, placed himself at the head of the column, and appealed to the crowd to keep the peace.

He was heeded only briefly. Then the stone-throwing was resumed, citizens jostled the soldiers and tried to wrest their muskets away from them, and some officers shouted an order to double-quick in the hope that the soldiers could get out of there before the busines grew serious. This seemed to make matters worse instead of better, for the running Yankees looked like chicken-hearted fugitives who dared not fight, and in no time at all there was a full-scale riot and men who had merely been trying to hurt began to try to kill each other. Shots were fired, from the ranks and from the sidewalks—in all of the tumult no one was ever certain just who fired first—and Mayor Brown, sensibly concluding that his presence protected neither the soldiers nor the citizens, stepped out of the column.

A detachment of police arrived at last. (It would have been there from the beginning if Secretary Cameron's people had bothered to tell the governor or the mayor when the 6th Massachusetts was going to arrive.) Enough order was restored to enable the battered companies to reach the Camden Street station and board the cars for Washington. As the troop train at last steamed out, there was one final incident, which the people of Baltimore would remember for a long time. A group of men near the track voiced a cheer for Jefferson Davis, and some soldier or soldiers fired through the car windows in reply, killing an eminently respectable merchant named Robert W. Davis, who had had no part whatever in the rioting. Back at the President Street station the unlucky companies from Pennsylvania were badly beaten before the police could take charge; not knowing what else to do, the police at last sent the men back to Philadelphia—profoundly unhappy men, who had shed blood but had acquired no glory, suffering the final ignominy of being sent home by the police.

The Massachusetts regiment had had casualties: 4 men killed and 36 wounded, not to mention about 130 who had disappeared in all the excitement but who, presumably, would eventually reappear. (This of course would include the members of the band, which had received contusions at the railroad station along with the Pennsylvanians.) The citizens of Baltimore had an even worse casualty list—12 men dead and an undetermined number injured. The first fatalities of the war had been recorded.⁸

Some time that evening the 6th Massachusetts got to Washington. It left behind it a Baltimore that was all but on fire with indignation, and many of those who were angry were not secessionists at all. There were men who argued that the troops were as much to blame for the fighting as the sidewalk crowds, the War Department's handling of the business had been inexcusably inept, and Mayor Brown believed that the killing of Davis, the cheering but non-violent merchant, kept many citizens from feeling "a keener sense of blame attaching to themselves as the aggressors." The Baltimore Police Board met that evening and agreed that there would be an even worse riot if any more troops came through the city; to prevent it, the bridges connecting Baltimore by rail with the East must be burned, and Governor Hicks reluctantly concurred. A special committee was sent off to Washington to tell Lincoln about it.