In far-off Washington it was South Carolina’s fiery Representative Laurence M. Keitt who carried the news to a wedding reception attended by President James Buchanan. Hearing the commotion behind him as Keitt arrived, Buchanan asked Virginia Congressman Roger A. Pryor’s wife Sara what was going on. She found Keitt “leaping in the air, shaking a paper over his head, exclaiming, ‘Thank God! Oh, thank God! South Carolina has seceded!’”
She returned to Buchanan’s side, bent over, and told him, “It appears, Mr. President, that South Carolina has seceded from the Union.” Stunned, Buchanan fell back into his chair, clutching its arms. He asked her to call his carriage; he would be leaving right away. “There was no more thought of bride, bridegroom, wedding cake or wedding breakfast,” wrote Sara.
1860
FUTURE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO FUTURE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE Confederate States of America: The USA would not—that is, not—attempt to dictate policy on slavery within the CSA.
So wrote Abraham Lincoln to Georgia Representative Alexander H. Stephens on December 22. “The South would be in no more danger in this respect,” wrote President-elect Lincoln to his onetime colleague in the U.S. House, “than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is a right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.”
If President Buchanan was stunned by the secession of South Carolina (no real surprise to most political onlookers), South Carolina in turn was about to be outraged by the audacity—the effrontery—of the U.S. Army officer commanding a few troops at Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor.
On the night after Christmas, without notice or warning, he moved his entire garrison from the exposed, unprotected spit of land known as Sullivan’s Island to the real and more isolated island out in the harbor—Fort Sumter.
Moultrie, as Abner Doubleday noted, to South Carolinians, “was almost a sacred spot, endeared by many precious historical associations, for the ancestors of most of the principal families had fought there in the Revolutionary War.”
Doubleday, later famous for his dubious claim of “baseball pioneer,” was a young Federal officer taking part in the nighttime move on December 26. His commander at Fort Sumter, the man who decided his men would be safer, his delicate position in a sea of hostility stronger, was Major Robert Anderson. And never mind that Anderson’s own father had fought the British at the same Fort Moultrie and had been kept prisoner in Charleston! All that aside, Charleston was outraged.
As Anderson’s small command of sixty-one enlisted men, seven officers, and thirteen musicians debarked from their boats on the wharf at Sumter, local workers engaged in improvements at the island fort “rushed out to meet us,” recalled Doubleday. Most of them were angry and called out, “What are these soldiers doing here?” A “demonstration” with bayonets forced them back, “and the disloyal workmen were shipped off to the mainland.”
On that mainland, meanwhile, Charleston was agog over Major Anderson’s surprise move. Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a former U.S. senator from South Carolina, wrote that Anderson had “united the Cotton States.” Reflecting the mood of those around her, she also noted: “Those who want a row are in high glee. Those who dread it are glum and thoughtful.”
The talk in Charleston the next day, December 27, was, “Fort Sumter must be taken,” even though Sumter was one of the strongest Federal bastions in the South. With obvious trepidation, Mary Chesnut had to wonder: “How in the name of sense are they to manage it? I shudder to think of rash moves.”
1861
THE TROUBLE WITH FORT SUMTER WAS THAT IT REALLY WAS AN ISLAND SITUATED in hostile waters. As the year began, it was, by order of South Carolina’s authorities, cut off from the mainland—no communication, no supplies for Major Anderson and his garrison of eighty souls.
In Washington, the policymakers of the Federal capital awaited a change in presidents at the very moment of the young Republic’s worst crisis ever. Winfield Scott, general in chief of the U.S. Army, had obtained permission to send Major Anderson help in the form of supplies, ammunition, and additional troops.
The supplies and 250 reinforcements set sail in an ordinary, civilian merchant ship called Star of the West. But at Fort Sumter, Anderson was expecting his resupply and reinforcement to be accomplished by U.S. Navy warships.
The Star of the West arrived off the harbor entrance at 1:30 in the morning on January 9, then hove to in the main shipping channel to wait for daylight before proceeding farther.
As daylight began to reveal her outlines, she was moving again. Artillery hidden in nearby sandhills opened fire. The first shot was traditional—across the bow. When the Star of the West kept moving, the cannon fire continued. Two rounds struck the merchant ship, which ran a flag up and down a forward mast as if pleading for Anderson to tell her what to do. Now Fort Moultrie lay in the ship’s path, manned by hot-eyed South Carolina secessionists. And Moultrie’s guns, while not yet in range, opened fire.
At Fort Sumter, all was confusion and disarray at the ship’s unexpected appearance. Army surgeon Samuel Crawford, one of Major Anderson’s seven officers at the island outpost, later wrote that Anderson didn’t know what to do, since he had anticipated a warship rather than a merchant vessel. And further, snarled halyards prevented his men from replying quickly to the Star’s signals.
The Star of the West was not about to present her vulnerable broadside for a raking by the batteries at Fort Moultrie, and so the rescue ship turned and pointed toward the open sea. Major Anderson was about to order Fort Sumter’s own guns into action—against Fort Moultrie. But he saw the ship turn away. “Hold on,” he told his men. “Do not fire.”
It was all over in just a few minutes. “The flag of the country had been fired on under our very guns, and no helping hand had been extended,” wrote Dr. Crawford, who soon would give up his medical bag to become an active combat commander—and eventually a major general—in the Union Army.
After a flutter of messages between Major Anderson at Fort Sumter and various authorities representing the newly formed Confederate States of America, there came a final, most formal, notice to the U.S. Army officer at 3:30 a.m. on April 12.
Sir: 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 fire of his batteries at Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.
BEGINNINGS
First Time Out
WHAT WAS IT LIKE, THAT FIRST TIME UNDER FIRE? IN REAL BATTLE DURING the U.S. Civil War? Brothers of the native soil against brothers of the same good earth?
Said (or wrote) an officer from Maine sometime after: “The behavior of those who were hit appeared to be singular; and, as there were so many of them, it looked as if we had a crowd of howling dervishes dancing and kicking around in our ranks.”
Said (or wrote) a Confederate cavalry colonel: “Barely in position, I heard a distant cannon, and at the same instant saw the ball high in the air. As near as I could calculate, it was going to strike about where I stood, and I dismounted with remarkable agility, only to see the missile of war pass 60 feet overhead.”
An unnamed soldier added: “For the first time in your life you listen to the whizzing of iron. Grape and canister fly into the ranks, bomb-shells burst overhead, and the fragments fly all around you.”
Maine officer again: “A bullet often knocks over the man it hits, and rarely fails by its force alone to disturb his equilibrium. Then the shock, whether painful or not, causes a sudden jump or shudder.”
Rebel colonel: “I felt rather foolish as I looked at my men, but a good deal relieved when I saw that they, too, had all squatted to the ground, and were none of them looking up at me. I quickly mounted and ordered them to ‘stand up.’”
Unnamed soldier: “A friend falls; perhaps a dozen or 20 of your comrades lie wounded or dying at your feet; a strang
e, involuntary shrinking steals over you, which it is impossible to resist.”
Maine officer: “Now, as every man, with hardly an exception, was either killed, wounded, hit in the clothes, hit by spent balls or stones, or jostled by his wounded comrades, it follows that we had a wonderful exhibition. Some reeled round and round, others threw up their arms and fell over backwards, others went plunging backward trying to regain their balance; a few fell to the front, but generally the force of the bullet prevented this, except where it struck low and apparently knocked the soldier’s feet from under him. Many dropped the musket and seized the wounded part with both hands, and a very few fell dead.”
Rebel colonel: “We were soon ordered to charge, and drove the enemy through the tall prairie grass, till they came to a creek and escaped. We passed some of the dead and wounded, the first sad results of real war that I had ever seen.”
Unnamed soldier : “You feel inclined neither to advance nor recede, but are spell-bound by the contending emotions of the moral and physical man. The cheek blanches, the lip quivers, and the eye almost hesitates to look upon the scene.”
Maine officer : “The enemy were armed with every kind of rifle and musket, and as their front was three times ours, we were under a crossfire almost from the first. The various tunes sung by the bullets we shall never forget….The fierce zip of the Minié bullets was not prominent by comparison at that particular moment, though there were enough of them certainly. The main body of sound was produced by the singing of slow, round balls and buckshot fired from a smooth-bore, which do not cut or tear the air as the creased ball does.
“Each bullet, according to its kind, size, rate of speed, and nearness to the ear, made a different sound. They seemed to be going past in sheets, all around and above us.”
Rebel colonel : “At night the heavens opened wide, the rain fell in torrents; not even a campfire could be kept to light up the impenetrable gloom, and I sought a comfortable mud-hole to sleep as best I could.
“The pale rigid faces that I had seen turned up for the evening sun appeared before me as I tried in vain to shield my own [face] from the driving rain, and as the big foot of a comrade, blundering round in the darkness, splashed my eyes full of mud, I closed them to sleep, muttering to myself, ‘And this is war.’”
Unnamed soldier : “In this [frozen] attitude you may, perhaps, be ordered to stand an hour, inactive, havoc meanwhile marking its footsteps with blood on every side. Finally the order is given to advance, to fire, or to charge. And now, what a change! With your first shot you become a new man. Personal safety is your least concern. Fear has no existence in your bosom. Hesitation gives way to an uncontrollable desire to rush into the thickest part of the fight. The dead and dying around you, if they receive a passing thought, only serve to stimulate you to revenge.”
Further : “You become cool and deliberate, and watch the effect of the bullets, the shower of bursting shells, the passage of cannon-balls as they rake their murderous channels through your ranks, the plunging of wounded horses, the agonies of the dying, and the clash of contending arms, which follows the charge, with a feeling so calloused by surrounding circumstances that your soul seems dead to every sympathising [sic] and selfish thought.”
So it was for the newcomer to battle, it seems. But when it’s all over, what then?
“Walking the battleground, among the dead and groaning wounded,” said the unknown soldier, “[you] begin to realize the horrors of war, and experience a reaction of nature.” Wondrously, “the heart opens its floodgates, humanity reasserts herself again, and you begin to feel.”
You now help the wounded, friend or foe. Foe, too? Yes. “The enemy, whom, but a short time before, full of hate, you were doing all in your power to kill, you now endeavor to save.”
You provide water, food, whatever he needs. “All that is human and charitable in your nature now rises to the surface.” Amazing. And, oh, so true: “A battlefield is eminently a place that tries men’s souls.”
Fresh Start Sought
HOW TO START AN “INSTANT” GOVERNMENT? THAT WAS THE CHALLENGE FOR A mere thirty-eight men representing the “secesh” states early in 1861, and the solution they came up with—in an amazingly short time—was a mirror image of the very government they were so avowed to leave behind.
They wished for a president and for a congress, and of course a constitution, all very much like the democratic system they knew so well. All in all, their creation wasn’t that different in its framework from the government seated in Washington, D.C.
In framework, yes, but in substance, a few major differences! One, the very issue that affected all differences between the two governments—slavery.
The Union—the Federal government of the United States—had not yet banned slavery. That was yet to come. Lincoln had not yet written his Emancipation Proclamation. Fort Sumter, in fact, had not yet been fired upon.
No matter. The secession leaders, gathering in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new union, chose to have a constitution very similar to the familiar U.S. Constitution, to have a president and congress all their own (although their president would be limited to one six-year term only).
The delegates assembled made no bones about their view of slavery. It would stay! Their constitution ruling all matters of law within their nation (just like the U.S. Constitution) expressly sought out and addressed this most acerbic issue. No law, the new charter said, would be allowed if it had the effect of “denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves.” In short, the institution of slavery would be protected by constitutional mandate (although in the same breath the African slave trade was banned outright).
The thirty-eight delegates of six seceding states (with Texas soon expected, as well) had gathered on February 4, 1861, weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter. Howell Cobb of Georgia had been elected president of the convention of secesh states that convened in Montgomery at the noon hour, and he lost no time in stating their common cause. “The separation is perfect, complete, and perpetual,” he said. “The great duty is now imposed upon us of providing for these States a government for their future security and protection.”
In Washington on the same day, a Virginia-sponsored Peace Convention also convened. There, 131 delegates from twenty-one states searched for a way to mend the national rift. Former President John Tyler, himself a Virginian, presided over this convention.
Congress, too, was meeting, and the Electoral College presidential vote approved by Congress this day was: Abraham Lincoln, 180 votes; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (a future Confederate general), 72; John Bell of Tennessee (the Constitutional Union’s presidential candidate), 39; and Stephen Douglas, Democrat and senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s famous debate rival, only 12.
Also on February 4 in Washington, Louisiana’s two U.S. senators, Judah Benjamin and John Slidell, left their Federal seats to join Louisiana in the secession. Benjamin would serve as attorney general, and later as secretary of state, for the new nation.
The next day, February 5, John Tyler told his convention that “the eyes of the whole country are turned to this assembly, in expectation and hope.” Unfortunately, not all, for in Montgomery, at that other convention, the Confederacy’s future vice president, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, pushed through a slate of rules for the secesh convention’s business. Then South Carolina’s Christopher Memminger submitted a fateful resolution urging the creation of “a Confederacy of the States which have seceded from the Federal Union.” A committee was to study on it and present a plan for forming the new nation’s government.
Events clearly were moving beyond redemption.
On February 6, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were hosts at a farewell reception for friends, neighbors, and politicians at the Lincoln home in Springfield, Illinois—like Montgomery, a state capital. He would be leaving February 11, the day before his birthday, for the journey to Washington, never to return.
February 7 dawned, and before that day’
s end Christopher Memminger’s Committee of Twelve brought forward its plan of government. The entire convention now met in secret to debate the content of the report. Details of the South’s fresh start would be argued in camera.
The day of the nation aborning was February 8, and the vote taken that evening for a provisional constitution was without a single dissent. It was provisional because the document still had to go before the several seceding states for their ratification. That, too, would be accomplished with surprising speed for such a weighty matter.
Why all the rush? The purpose was to have everything in place and functioning by the time Lincoln was sworn in—March 4—as the unacceptable new president of the Federal Union. Amazingly, the Southern secessionists had their provisional bylaws and governmental framework in operation within a week of their first meeting. And it only took a month for the various states to ratify a permanent constitution just slightly different from the provisional one, and both hardly at odds with the original U.S. Constitution—except for the slavery clause.
Such similarity was no accident, really. As one of the secesh delegates later wrote, “There was a marked and purposed agreement with the Constitution of the United States.” It wasn’t that the South left the U.S. Constitution behind, but rather that it withdrew from “wicked and injurious perversions of the compact.”
A name was needed for the new nation, and what should it be? The “Republic of Washington”? Or another “United States of America,” and fie to those who thought that name already secured by the Union’s perversion of the old order? In the end, the new nation’s name simply reflected the Memminger resolution’s language calling for a “Confederacy of the States” seceding from the Union. And so it became the Confederate States of America (CSA).
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