American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The militant and vocal crowds seemed to stiffen Lincoln’s determination as he neared the capital. But Washington had little sense of this. It was boiling with contemptuous stories of Lincoln’s western gaucheries and with rumors that Seward or some other cabinet eminence would control the new administration. Nor did Lincoln boost his prestige when, to evade a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore, he abandoned his train and slipped into Washington unannounced. Ensconced in a fine suite in the popular Willard’s Hotel, he received border state delegations, giving them the pledges they wanted: that he would leave slavery intact and delay using force to bring the seceded states back into the Union. Acting in an atmosphere of heightened tension and polarization, Lincoln wanted to regain balance among the warring sides. But some Republicans in Congress were supporting a “Force Bill” to give the President full control over all federal and state troops—a measure almost certain to drive Virginia and other wavering states into secession with the lower South. Other Republicans, including Horace Greeley in his Tribune, were urging that the cotton states be allowed to “go in peace.”

  In this supreme crisis Lincoln, however much he might talk about liberty and equality, was determined above all else to save the Union, as something precious in itself. The Union to him was more than an ideal—it was bone of his bone, the great protecting shield for his family, the legacy of his revered forefathers, the house for his home. To preserve the balances of union he had chosen a unity Cabinet, with the now moderate antislavery Seward of New York as Secretary of State; the forthright Chase of Ohio for the Treasury; a border state loyalist, Edward Bates of Missouri, as Attorney General; a New Englander, Gideon Welles, as Secretary of the Navy; another border state man, Montgomery Blair—a son of the old Jacksonian—as Postmaster General; Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as Secretary of War; and an Indianan, Caleb B. Smith, as Secretary of the Interior.

  But on March 4 he had a speech to give, an oath to take from Chief Justice Taney. A statue of “Liberty,” waiting to be placed on the unfinished Capitol dome, lay on the grass before him as Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address. He sought to reassure the South that neither he nor the Republican party threatened it. He quoted the Republican platform plank pledging not to interfere with slavery, and to enforce the fugitive-slave law rigorously. But secession he flatly rejected, for it was the essence of anarchy. “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations,” Lincoln said, was “the only true sovereign of a free people.”

  Much of the address read like a lecture in constitutional law, but toward the end: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  But the Richmond Enquirer echoed almost every other southern paper in labeling the address as “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic.” It continued: “Sectional war awaits only the signal gun.”

  THE FLAG THAT BORE A SINGLE STAR

  At half-past four on the morning of April 12, 1861, a shell rose from a mortar battery at Fort Johnson, arched in a fiery red parabola through the dark air as its fuse spat out flame, and burst over tiny Fort Sumter in the neck of Charleston Harbor. For the next thirty-four hours Confederate batteries poured shot and shell into the fort occupied by federal troops. From their rooftops Charlestonians watched the explosions. Well-dressed ladies—if the Harper’s Weekly artist was to be believed—lay prostrate in tears, holding one another in their arms. And well they might. That mortar shell was the signal for war.

  It was a signal desperately feared by some, ardently sought by others, long expected by almost all. For months now Sumter had loomed as a symbol of southern determination and northern defensiveness, of the clash between state and national sovereignty, of the collision between two cultures. It seemed only fitting that a fort off Charleston should be the fulcrum of conflict. Federal arsenals and garrisons throughout the South had yielded to the secessionists, but Charleston was too important as a port, and South Carolina too conspicuous in the leadership ranks of secession, for Washington to surrender Sumter. The pride of Unionists had been stirred when Major Robert Anderson of the regular army led his little force a mile across the water from vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Sumter, a half-completed square of masonry. Even Buchanan had summoned enough nerve to send an unarmed steamer in December with provisions for the garrison, but fire from the shore batteries drove it away. After that, the lame-duck President had been happy to leave the spiky problem to his successor.

  By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration a South Carolinian “circle of fire” surrounded Sumter. Forty-three guns, manned by several hundred amateur cannoneers, supported by several thousand volunteer infantrymen, who in turn were backed by tens of thousands of militant Charlestonians, ringed the fort. But Sumter’s sixty cannons controlled the entrance to the harbor. Now time was running out for Anderson, as his provisions were low. Lincoln was torn between advisers counseling that the fort was indefensible and should be evacuated, or at least allowed to be honorably starved out, and others who urged that a relief expedition was both militarily feasible and politically necessary to back up the new President’s pledge to protect federal property and uphold the law.

  As the Administration vacillated, rumors flew around Washington, hopes and fears rose and fell, militants North and South pressed for decision. Some Southerners preferred not to leave the issue of peace and war to Lincoln; Roger Pryor, a Virginia congressman, urged a Charleston crowd to “Strike a blow!”—promising that the “moment blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South.”

  By this time Lincoln had decided. On April 8 Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina received presidential notice that a fleet was on its way to Sumter with food, and that it would fight its way into the harbor if fired upon. General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, commanding the forces besieging Sumter, wired Montgomery for instructions. Now it was Davis who had to face the issue of peace and war. Each side, North and South, preferred to have its way without war; each side would go to war if denied its way; each side wished the other to bear the onus of starting a war. But Jefferson Davis overrode the uncertainty in Montgomery. His orders sped back to Beauregard: the fort must surrender or be reduced before the relief fleet arrived.

  The Confederate general sent a delegation of notables, including Pryor, to demand the fort’s capitulation; after Anderson refused, the four emissaries rowed directly to the nearest shore battery. When the battery commander offered to let Pryor open the bombardment, the congressman turned pale, saying, “I could not fire the first gun of the war.” But Edmund Ruffin, a Virginian who had become one of South Carolina’s most fiery extremists, had no such qualms. It was his shell that burst on Sumter and awoke Charleston to the coming of war.

  As the Confederate fire intensified, the fort became an inferno of exploding shells, crashing masonry, and acrid smoke. The garrison’s stubborn defense won cheers from the Confederates, even from the Yankee-hater Ruffin. So skillfully did Anderson deploy his men that not one of them was killed. But the barracks caught fire several times, and even though the blazes were extinguished, Anderson feared that his powder magazine would be touched off and the whole place blown up. The surrender terms allowed the garrison to march out with drums beating and colors flying, to the ship that would take them to a hero’s welcome in New York. Anderson had also requested and been granted a hundred-gun salute to the American flag. On the fiftieth round a gun exploded prematurely and killed Private Daniel Hough. He was the only casualty of Sumter, the first of 600,000 deaths to come.

  “Well, boys,” a New York farmer said, “it’s Massachusetts and South Carolina. I’m a-going to take the train to Boston and enlis
t.” Southern farm boys also rallied around the flag—a new Confederate flag that they christened with a song:

  We are a band of brothers, And native to the soil,

  Fighting for our liberty, With treasure, blood and toil;

  And when our rights were threatened, The cry rose near and far,

  Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag, that bears a Single Star.

  The attack on Sumter did what words had failed to do: it united and galvanized the North. Lincoln’s call on April 15 brought 75,000 volunteers within a few days. People welcomed the end to the long weeks of indecision; “strange to say,” Congressman John Sherman wrote to his brother, the war “brings a feeling of relief: the suspense is over.” It seemed, said Allan Nevins, “a purifying hurricane which swept away all sordid aims. Idealists had been disheartened by the trickeries, bargains, and compromises of the past ten years; by the Ostend Manifesto, the Nebraska Act, the Lecompton swindle, the filibustering, the corruption, and the absorption in moneymaking. Now, they said, the flame of devotion to the principles of Washington, Hamilton, and Marshall was burning brightly again.”

  But Washington and the Fathers stood for Union. Now the house was divided, the Union broken in half. Or rather it was broken into two-thirds and one-third, for the population of the twenty-three northern and border states was now 22 million, and that of the South 9 million, of whom 3.5 million were slaves. The North predominated in economic power too, with its modernizing agriculture, growing industry, substantial railroad grid and merchant marine. The South’s economy still depended on agricultural staples—especially cotton—and on banking capital that amounted to only one-third that of the North. But Montgomery had two vital military resources: an aroused citizenry with a great military heritage, and a brilliant officer corps, vastly augmented when Robert E. Lee declined Lincoln’s offer of the federal field command and accepted leadership of Virginia’s military forces.

  Still, the two armies would be composed mainly of volunteers, officered by men who had seen little action, save for Indian expeditions, since the Mexican War. The Confederate volunteers ranged from the wealthy and wellborn members of the Washington Artillery Battalion, Louisiana’s most prestigious militia unit, to Carolina backwoodsmen in homespun and drab butternut. Wade Hampton of South Carolina raised, trained, and equipped his own private army of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Another set of volunteers who joined freely but reluctantly were the regular army officers from the border states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Albert Sidney Johnston left with his state—Texas—in secession. Others, however—Winfield Scott of Virginia, David Farragut of Tennessee—remained loyal to the Union, as did almost all the rank-and-file soldiers. Men from Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland faced harsh dilemmas, since both North and South organized units in their states. Here indeed were literal cases of brother against brother, even in the family of President Lincoln’s in-laws, the Todds.

  While sergeants shouted orders on a thousand drilling fields, while quartermasters bought muskets and tents and britches and cannons, Lincoln and Davis and their commanders planned strategy. The northern plan as it developed was multi-pronged: to advance on Richmond in force; blockade southern harbors; and capture the Mississippi and Tennessee river reaches, in order to divide the Confederacy and isolate its main regions. Southern strategists planned to capture Washington and then strike north into Maryland and central Pennsylvania, whence they would seek to cut the Northeast off from the Northwest … Twelve thousand miles away a superior student of the tricks of history, a Russian nobleman, bustled around his study, jotting down notes for the first draft of what would become a monumental work of literature. In War and Peace Count Leo Tolstoi would describe the chaos of battle—the accidents, missed orders, mistaken identities, loss of control, impotence of leadership—just as the amateur American soldiers would experience it in the first major clash of the war. That encounter occurred at Bull Run, in late July 1861.

  By summer, as the ranks of the armies swelled, the war was taking on a momentum of its own. Soldiers and civilians were demanding immediate and decisive action from their governments. One quick march to battle and victory would follow. Northern troops were rushed into Washington to defend the capital, while Virginia volunteers occupied Alexandria and Harpers Ferry on the Potomac. There the two forces were poised in June, while the clamor for action continued to grow.

  Bull Run was a small, muddy stream running southeast through pasture and weeds. The Warrenton Turnpike, a main road leading southwest from Washington, crossed the Run at a stone bridge, but the stream also could be forded in several places. South of Bull Run lay Manassas Junction, where rail lines from Richmond and the Shenandoah met. These railroads would shape the coming battle.

  General Winfield Scott, the aged and corpulent commander in chief of the United States Army—a Tolstoian figure himself—ordered General Irvin McDowell to collect Union regiments around Washington and advance them on July 8 to seize Manassas Junction, in the face of General Beauregard of Sumter fame. If Beauregard’s men retreated, McDowell could hold a grip on the railroads of northern Virginia; if not, then the public at least would have its fight. McDowell was reluctant to advance—his troops were green, his supply wagons too few, and his reinforcements not yet arrived. By July 16, however, he felt strengthened enough to start south with 30,000 men. As the Union columns marched through rolling hills and thick woods, Private Edwin Wyler of the 5th Massachusetts found blackberries to pick, milk to buy, and fresh lamb to purchase or “capture.” Aside from the obstacles left by the retreating “rebs” and the blacks encountered in small, run-down hamlets, it seemed to him more like a picnic near his native Woburn than an invasion of the mysterious, hostile South. The masthead of Greeley’s Tribune had exhorted: “Forward to Richmond!”—perhaps it would be this easy.

  Outnumbered by McDowell three to two, Beauregard fell back to prepared defenses behind Bull Run. The old fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, now an infantry private in the 2nd South Carolina, recorded his comrades’ anger on being ordered to retreat before the Yankees, but their spirits rose when they drove back the first incautious Union probes into the Bull Run lines, and when reinforcements arrived. General Joseph Johnston had been guarding the Shenandoah Valley with 11,000 men against a force nearly twice that size led by General Robert Patterson. While Patterson fretted, hesitated, and exchanged bombastic telegrams with Scott in Washington, Johnston with astute timing slipped brigade after brigade along a single-gauge railroad to the east. Jackson’s Virginians, Bartow’s Georgians, Bee’s Mississippians and Alabamans were already joining Beauregard, as was Johnston himself.

  McDowell’s plan was to send his strongest columns around Beauregard’s left flank, crossing the Run at and above the Stone Bridge. With an early start and a quick march, his men could seize Manassas Junction before Johnston could arrive by rail—or so the Union man thought. But things soon began to go wrong. Units became delayed and lost as they worked their way through jammed roads on the Confederate flank, so that the troops reached the battlefield exhausted. Once across the stream they encountered Colonel Nathan Evans’ lone brigade guarding the enemy flank. Reporter E. P. Doherty, covering the 71 st New York for the Times, noted that the Union men attacked bravely, but without much discipline, fighting in little knots and moving confusedly in and out of the smoke and underbrush. Soon a bloody stalemate developed.

  Expecting McDowell to attack his right, and dismissing the noise of the mounting battle on his left as a diversion, Beauregard kept most of his troops guarding the crossings below the Stone Bridge. He did allow Johnston to shift several of his brigades to the left, much to the disgust of Johnston’s men, who were lusting for battle and expecting it on the right. Instead they found themselves in the thick of the fray on the left, arriving just in time to shore up Evans’ wavering line. Across the Run, Colonel William Sherman’s troops had been equally frustrated, as they marched back and forth as decoys around the bridge, while only a few hundred
yards away Georgians and New Yorkers shot and impaled one another. Watching a farmer and his dog hunting in the fields and Confederate horsemen splashing back and forth across the stream, Sherman felt for a moment that he was back in peacetime. Finally, early in the afternoon, he was allowed to take his brigade across the Run, onto the flank of Bee’s and Bartow’s Valley brigades. Pushing Bee’s forces back, the Union troops advanced toward Henry Hill, the last position between them and the enemy’s rear. Holding Henry Hill, however, were Thomas Jackson’s 2,600 Virginians, and they were determined to stay. They did.

  “See Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Bee shouted to his now fleeing men. “Rally behind the Virginians!” As the Mississippians closed ranks with their comrades, regiment after regiment of Union men were storming up the hill, only to break under the withering fire of the enlarged “Stonewall Brigade.” When McDowell ordered two batteries of regular artillery forward to blast Jackson’s men out of their positions, rebel cavalry charged down on the cannons but were driven away by Union infantry. Arthur Cummings’ 33rd Virginia, which was closest to the northern guns on the hilltop, wavered. Fearful that his men could stand up under the fire no longer, Cummings, without orders, shouted, “Charge!”

  The Union artillerymen, shrouded in their own gun smoke and confused by the cavalry charge, saw gray-clad troops appear through the haze on their right. Friend or foe?—some regiments in both armies wore gray. Cummings’ men answered the question with a single volley that mowed down the gun crews and horses. The Confederates smashed through the battery, were thrown back, swarmed down again with the rest of Jackson’s brigade, yelling at the top of their lungs. The battle surged back and forth, in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Soldiers drifted in, attracted by the sound of fighting; others pulled out, unarmed and bloodied, spreading word that all was lost. It was the critical moment of the battle, but they could not know this either.