The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  It had come the turn of one of the guns on Sumter’s left face to hurl its shot. As its cannoneer, Private John Thompson, approached to load, a sight as stirring in its way as the flag flying again over the ramparts met his eye. There at the embrasure, staring in at him with blazing eyes, was Louis Trezevant Wigfall holding a saber with a white handkerchief tied to its tip.

  Wigfall was a formidable sight under any circumstances. His friend Mary Chesnut thought him “the very spirit of war.”40 He was tall and powerfully built with a wild mass of black hair tinged with gray. His straight broad brow, from which hair shot up like the vegetation on a river bank, shrouded beetling black eyebrows. His mouth was coarse and grim, his jaw square, his nose thick and argumentative. The eyes staring in at Thompson were of wonderful depth and lit, as somebody had suggested, by a light found only in the head of a wild beast, fierce yet calm. One got the feeling he would as soon kill you as look at you. He is said to have slain more than half a dozen men in duels. On the Senate floor he was venomous and taunting, indiscriminately insulting to his fellow senators and always eager for a personal confrontation. But one of his virtues, suggested by Horace Greeley, was his repugnance for conflicts between parties so palpably ill-matched, as in this case. Perhaps his greatest social failing, suggested by another admirer, was his desire to be always where he could be as rude as he pleased. And here he was at the embrasure at Fort Sumter staring rudely in at Private Thompson.41

  A brief argument followed, for Thompson was no pushover either.

  “I wish to see the commandant—my name is Wigfall and I come from General Beauregard,” the impostor announced. As he was hauled in he relinquished his sword to Thompson and turned to confront Captain Foster and Lieutenant Davis, who had stepped forward to meet him.

  “Let us stop this firing,” Wigfall demanded. “You are on fire, and your flag is down—let us quit.”

  “No, Sir,” Davis said, “our flag is not down. Step out here and you will see it waving over the ramparts.”

  Wigfall ran out and looked up and was blinded by the smoke. Anderson, meanwhile, had arrived.

  “To what am I indebted for this visit?” he asked Wigfall.

  “I am Colonel Wigfall, of General Beauregard’s staff,” Wigfall replied. “For God’s sake, Major, let this thing stop. There has been enough bloodshed already.”

  “There has been none on my side,” Anderson reported, “and besides, your batteries are still firing on me.”

  “I’ll soon stop that.” Wigfall turned to Thompson, who still held his sword, and pointed to the handkerchief. “Wave that out there.”

  Thompson said something that boiled down to “Wave it yourself,” and Wigfall snatched the sword and took a few steps toward the embrasure.

  Anderson called him back. “If you desire that to be seen you had better send it to the parapet.”

  A white hospital sheet was soon produced and waved by one of the gunners, and Wigfall got down to business. “You have defended your flag nobly, Sir. You have done all that is possible for man to do, and General Beauregard wishes to stop the fight. On what terms, Major Anderson, will you evacuate this fort?”

  “Terms? I shall evacuate on the most honorable terms—or die here.”

  Would he evacuate on the terms proposed by Beauregard on April 11?

  “On the terms last proposed I will,” Anderson replied.

  “Then, Sir,” Wigfall said expectantly, “I understand that the fort is to be ours?”

  “On those conditions only, I repeat.”

  “Well, Sir,” said Wigfall, “I will return to General Beauregard.” Bowing low he left by the way he had come.42

  Beauregard knew nothing of this, of course. Wigfall was on the general’s staff as he claimed, but he had been on Morris Island and hadn’t seen the general in two days. The commander at Morris Island had sent Wigfall over, on his own authority after the flag had fallen, to ask Anderson if he was ready to call it quits.43

  When Beauregard in Charleston saw the flag fall, he acted under the same impulse. He ordered Stephen Lee, Roger Pryor, and William Porcher Miles into a rowboat with directions to proceed to Sumter, inform Anderson that his flag was down, that his quarters were in flames, and ask if he needed help. Halfway there, the delegation saw that the U.S. flag had been hoisted again over the fort—Peter Hart’s work. So they turned around and started back toward Charleston. They had not gone far when they saw a white flag now floating over the ramparts instead—Louis Wigfall’s work.

  They swung the boat about again and continued to bob along toward Sumter, arriving shortly after Wigfall left. On landing and being conducted to Anderson they asked if he needed help.

  “Present my compliments to General Beauregard,” Anderson replied, “and say to him I thank him for his kindness, but need no assistance.”

  All this wasn’t looking quite right to Anderson. “Gentlemen,” he continued in a worried voice, “do I understand you have come direct from General Beauregard?”

  They assured him they had.

  “Why,” Anderson said, his alarm rising, “Colonel Wigfall has just been here as an aide to and by authority of General Beauregard, and proposed the same terms of evacuation offered on the 11th instant.”

  The three said they knew nothing of Wigfall’s visit, but assured Anderson again that they had just left the general in Charleston. Would Anderson care to reduce to writing the terms proposed by Wigfall?

  Anderson was mortified. Well, no, he didn’t mind. But he was going to run his flag up again, regretting now that he had ever taken it down. He would not have done so if he had known Wigfall had not come directly from Beauregard—that he had not been the general’s official emissary.

  The three urged him not to raise the flag again until they could return to Beauregard with the terms of evacuation. Anderson agreed, and they hurried back to the boat and began rowing toward Charleston.44

  It was midafternoon when Major David Rumph Jones and Colonel Charles Allston, Jr., climbed into a boat and headed for Sumter as Beauregard’s second wave of emissaries. As they approached the fort at about three o’clock, Jones saw Truman Seymour standing at the wharf waiting for them. Even though Seymour needed a bath, Jones would have recognized his old classmate anywhere. Seymour must have seen the irony in all of this. Neighbor Jones had come calling—and on the most absurd bit of unneighborly business. Wait until Foster saw this.

  Jones and Allston told Anderson, who was still trying to explain his Wigfall mistake, that they were authorized to offer the terms of April 11, minus the right to salute the flag. Anderson deplored this omission, and urged that it be reconsidered. The two Confederate peacemakers left, saying they would see what they could do.45

  At about seven that evening Jones returned, this time with three others and the good news that the garrison would be permitted to salute the flag on leaving after all. Anderson read the final terms aloud to his officers and told them he was pleased—Beauregard was being most generous. It was agreed that the garrison would evacuate the fort at 9:00 the next morning.46

  The issue had never been in doubt. Anderson’s had been a token defense, but far more of a fight than what former Secretary of War Floyd would have expected and hoped of a Kentucky soldier with a Georgia wife. Floyd had expected he would be more reasonable in handing over the fort. Even so it had been far less than what Anderson might have done. He had held out for thirty-four hours, but Foster believed the men would have cheerfully held out one or two more days, perhaps longer, on pork alone. He overheard one of the men say, “I would rather live on pork for two weeks than see that flag come down.”47

  It wasn’t will that gave out; it was everything else. Nevertheless Anderson’s dedication to his duty had left Sumter in ruins. The Confederates had poured four thousand cannonballs into the fort. Some six hundred shot marks pocked the face of the scarp wall. The living quarters had been demolished, the main gates destroyed, the gorge walls grievously damaged, the magazine doors sealed by th
e heat. Just about everything that could be burned was burned.48 When the Confederates finally raised their flags the next morning it was over a wreck. As a reporter said, “it were as if the Genius of Destruction had tasked its energies to make the thing complete, brooded over by the desolation of ages.”49

  The next morning, Sunday April 14, was clear and warm. With the war had come the spring. The harbor teemed with vessels of every description filled with anxious spectators. Inside the fort a salute of one hundred guns began a long, cadenced booming; but at the fiftieth shot it abruptly stopped. What thirty-four hours of cannonading had not done—killed a man on either side—the salute had. A cartridge gun exploded, killing Private Daniel Hough instantly and mortally wounding Edward Gallway. The new war had claimed its first victims. Anderson wrapped black crepe around his arm, folded up the shot-torn colors to take as the winding sheet for his own burial day, and marched out of Fort Sumter at the head of his little garrison. The drums throbbed. The band played “Yankee Doodle” as the soldiers marched across the parade, then broke into “Hail to the Chief” as Anderson emerged from the gate.50

  Beauregard wired Montgomery: “I have possession of Sumter.”51

  The evicted defenders boarded the Confederate steamer Isabel, and early the next morning with the rising tide sailed slowly out of the harbor. Confederate artillerymen on Cummings Point lined the beach to watch them leave, heads uncovered in a final silent salute to the commander who was “pluck, pluck to the backbone,” and his soot-covered artillerymen. The Isabel took them to the Baltic waiting in the harbor. The expedition that had come to help them stay and could only watch them endure, would now take them home.52

  Later that day—the fifteenth—Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, and four more states, including Roger Pryor’s and Edmund Ruffin’s Virginia, seceded.

  So that was it. They didn’t take it all that seriously in England. “Many a ‘difficulty’ at the bar has cost more bloodshed,” editorialized the London Times. Virtually everybody in America knew it immediately for what it was, however—a national catastrophe. “The heather is on fire,” George Ticknor wrote his friend Sir Edmund Head. “The Rubicon was passed,” said Stephen Lee, who had seen it all firsthand and close up. “Oh to think that I should have lived to see the day when Brother should rise against Brother,” cried a grandmother in Indiana.53

  In late April Truman Seymour went home to West Point, and on a clear moonlit night fifty cadets marched to Professor Robert Weir’s quarters to serenade him. Seymour came to the window after a while and responded with a patriotic speech. “We could see his features well,” said one of the serenaders, “and he looked as if he had had a hard time at Fort Sumter. When he made his appearance at the window the cadets applauded everything that he said, from beginning to end. But he would have been applauded if he had not said a word, for actions speak louder than words, and his actions at Fort Sumter had preceded him and endeared him to every true American heart.”54

  The news of Sumter reached Seymour’s old classmate John Gibbon at a fort in Utah Territory ironically named for John B. Floyd. The word had come by Pony Express from Fort Kearney. As spring had advanced and the threat of impending war had become more real, the anxiety in the garrisons on the frontier had become almost unbearable.

  On “pony day” when the rider galloped into Camp Floyd and left a copy of the news at the post trader’s store, Gibbon and all the other officers were waiting for him. Some had been waiting on the roof, peering anxiously out across the broad, dusty sagebrush plain toward the east.

  “Here he comes!” someone shouted, and the cry, “The Pony is coming,” raced through the camp. Those not already at the store hurried there. And a reader read it all aloud: Beauregard’s summons to surrender and Anderson’s reply; the threat to open fire; the first shot; the harbor of Charleston trembling under the roar of cannon manned on both sides by officers they knew—lifelong friends trying to kill one another. All of them clustered about the store fell quiet, and eventually began to drift away with their broken hearts, all hopes of peace blasted.

  “Our once happy and prosperous country was plunged into the horrors of civil war, the end of which no man could foretell,” Gibbon thought sadly.

  More news followed on successive pony days—the failure to relieve the fort, the final surrender, the excitement sweeping the country, Washington in peril, the marshaling of forces, Lincoln’s call for volunteers, more states preparing to secede, and the general preparations everywhere for the struggle all now saw coming. Southern officers at the garrison began resigning and starting for home. Soon orders came down to break up, abandon the post, forget the rebellious Mormons and the Indians, and march to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. There was more urgent business at hand.55

  Dabney Maury—the adjutant for the Department of New Mexico—was in Santa Fe when he heard. He had been watching for the weekly arrival of the mail with the same suspense and anxiety as his old classmate at Camp Floyd. The days dragged between one mail delivery and the next. The mail came only once a week, and if the Indians chose to interfere, not that often. Officers at the post gathered on those days in Maury’s parlor to wait for the mail to be sorted. Usually the letters from home were seized first. But not this time. They were pushed aside and everybody turned expectantly toward the reader.

  One after another they took the sheet and tried to read aloud, and each voice broke with emotion and could not continue. When finally they had gotten through it, it was some time before they could grasp what they had just read. For several minutes they sat staring at one another in disbelieving silence.

  Maury realized after a time that only the handful of officers in the room knew, and he seized the papers and ran out into the street to the officers’ quarters shouting the news as he ran.56

  At Camp Floyd, now renamed Fort Crittenden, the garrison began to dismantle. Most of its stores were sold at auction, the arms and ammunition were destroyed, and the soldiers started the slow, sad march to Leavenworth. Gibbon arrived there on October 8, seventy-four days after he left Fort Crittenden, and learned that his state, North Carolina, had seceded. He had been cut off for months from any communication with his family, and at Leavenworth he learned that his three brothers had joined the Confederate army. His heart was heavy when he went to reaffirm his loyalty to the Union.57

  Maury, in Santa Fe, immediately sent his resignation to the war department and prepared to go home to fight for Virginia. He waited until Colonel E.R.S. Canby, who was out leading a large expedition against the Navajos, returned. The Canbys had been staying with Maury and his wife in Santa Fe. Maury carefully explained to Canby how and where he had distributed the troops of the department. When that final duty was done, he turned both his office and his house over to the colonel, and left with his wife for Leavenworth. He would go from there to Richmond to offer his services to his state.58

  And so it was to be brother against brother, classmate against classmate, dear friend against dear friend. Whatever their choice, it was made with sad and wounded hearts.

  Stonewall’s

  Great Locomotive

  Heist

  When the Virginia Constitutional Convention voted to secede from the Union after the fall of Fort Sumter, Tom Jackson was a plain, “big-footed, taciturn, fearless, prayerful, tenderhearted and punctiliously polite” professor of artillery and natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute.1 And he elected to fight for his state against his country, even though he deplored slavery, regretted the rebellion, and decried war.

  He had seen enough of war to cause him to consider it “the sum of all evils.”2 But if your state was bound to fight a war, for whatever unfortunate reason against whatever enemy, then he believed that was the time to “draw your swords and throw away the scabbards.”3

  So when the governor of Virginia asked for a battalion of VMI cadets to help drill the state’s new tangle-footed volunteers, Major Jackson took the cadet drillmasters t
o Staunton on Sunday, April 21, to catch the Monday morning train to Richmond. And when his name came up in connection with the important command at Harpers Ferry later that week, a member of the convention demanded:

  “Who is this Major Jackson, that we are asked to commit to him so responsible a post?”

  A delegate from Rockbridge acquainted with the resolute over-achiever from the class of 1846 answered:

  “He is one who, if you order him to hold a post, will never leave it alive to be occupied by the enemy.”4

  The state’s governor, John Letcher, already knew that. He was Jackson’s neighbor in Lexington; he knew what kind of man Jackson was. He commissioned him a colonel of volunteers and gave him the Harpers Ferry command on Saturday, April 27. Harpers Ferry on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, with its armory and arsenal, was considered critical to the state’s security.

  Jackson’s eyes must have blazed. It was perfect: an independent command where the next shot was most likely to be fired.

  “The post I prefer above all others …,” he wrote his wife, Anna. “Little one, you must not expect to hear from me very often, as I expect to have more work than I ever had in the same length of time before.”5

  Jackson reported for work at Harpers Ferry two days later. The arms-making machinery at the arsenal was thought particularly important to the Confederacy, and Jackson’s job was either to hold the arsenal and/or get the machinery out and sent south.

  On the day he arrived, his command numbered two thousand volunteers and militia and was augmenting hourly. They were like all volunteers that early in the war—unorganized, undrilled, untrained, and ill-armed. Jackson began immediately moving out the machinery and whipping this green and growing army into shape.

  One of the first distractions to stir his ire, disrupt his sleep, and aggravate his dyspepsia was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The peacetime professor of artillery and natural philosophy found the wartime activity on the B&O’s main stem insufferable. Whistling locomotives pounded up and down the line relentlessly. Heavy freights loaded with coal for the Union cause swayed and thundered eastbound by day. Empty cars rocked and banged and clattered westbound back up the main stem by night.