by Bruce Catton
The report was brief and to the point. It was a resolution that read as follows:
“We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the Ordinance adopted by us in Convention of the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and also all Acts and parts of Acts, of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”
There was no debate. The motion was put to a vote and was carried, 169 to 0. The delegates then voted to meet again that evening for formal signing of the ordinance and for a general celebration, to which the governor, members of the legislature, and sundry other dignitaries were invited. Then, at one o’clock, the convention adjourned for the afternoon, and as these new founding fathers came out into the streets, bells were ringing, bold-faced placards were being circulated, cannon were being fired, and parades were in movement. By its own declaration South Carolina was now an independent nation, and Charleston was in a mood to celebrate.4
South Carolina was a state (or a nation) of complete individualists, and one of these—frail, aging, picturesque, and outspoken-refused to go along with the rejoicing. James Louis Petigru, an old-time Whig, a leading lawyer for thirty years and an old-fashioned Federalist of the Alexander Hamilton school, seems to have been the one outspoken Union man in Charleston, and he did not care who knew how he felt. Stalking down Broad Street just after the convention had adjourned, he heard all of the bells ringing and, meeting a friend in front of the city hall, asked dryly: “Where’s the fire?” There was no fire, the friend replied; the bells were ringing to announce the city’s joy at the passage of the ordinance of secession. Old Petigru turned on him. “I tell you there is a fire,” he snapped. “They have this day set a blazing torch to the temple of constitutional liberty and, please God, we shall have no more peace forever.” Then he turned and walked away. (He had told a friend, some days before this, that the Constitution was only two months older than he himself was; he expected now to outlive it.)5
Petigru was one individualist: a very different one was Edmund Ruffin, old and wispy, with white hair that came down to his shoulders—the most dedicated and appealing of all the men who had worked so hard for secession. He had spent himself, for years, not merely to make the Southland independent, but to make it fully fit for independence. He had waged an effective one-man campaign to restore the declining fertility of the Southern earth, teaching his fellow planters how to keep their lands from wearing out, doing all that one man could do to make his beloved region strong enough to stand on its own feet. He had tried, with some success, to blend scientific farming with the institution of slavery, and the South owed him a deeper debt than it owed to any other secessionist. He could celebrate, if any man could, with a clear conscience, and he went that evening to the convention hall—known then and thereafter as Secession Hall—to watch while the delegates signed the fateful ordinance. Some hours later he described the business in his diary:
“The signing occupied more than two hours, during which time there was nothing to entertain the spectators except their enthusiasm & joy. Yet no one was weary, & none left. Demonstrations of approbation in clapping & cheers were frequent—& when all the signatures had been affixed, & the President holding up the parchment proclaimed South Carolina to be a free and independent country, the cheers of the whole assembly continued for some minutes, while every man waved or threw up his hat, & every lady waved her handkerchief. The convention then adjourned, & the meeting separated. In the streets there had been going on other popular demonstrations of joy, from early in the afternoon. Some military companies paraded, salutes were fired, & as night came on bonfires, made of barrels of rosin, were lighted in the principal streets, rockets discharged, & innumerable crackers fired by the boys. As I now write, after 10 P.M., I hear the distant sounds of rejoicing, with the music of a military band, as if there was no thought of ceasing.”6
Midway between outspoken Petigru and dedicated Ruffin in his emotional response to this outpouring of high spirits was one frustrated Yankee—Caleb Cushing, the Massachusetts Democrat who had presided over assorted conventions during the spring months. He was here now as an envoy sent by President Buchanan, bearing a letter from the President to Governor Pickens; a sober man entrusted with an impossible mission. The President wrote that “from common notoriety” he gathered that South Carolina was considering secession. Feeling it his duty “to exert all the means in my power to avert so dread a catastrophe,” he hoped that Cushing would be able to persuade the governor and delegates to reconsider or at least to delay their projected action.
This of course was useless. No one in South Carolina cared to hear such talk at this late day, Governor Pickens perhaps least of all. A lawyer and planter who had both inherited and married money, Pickens had embraced the cause of immediate secession only lately, but he had all the fire of a new convert. Beginning his term as governor just before this convention opened, he made it clear in his inaugural address that the “overt act” for which secession was supposed to wait had already been committed—by the Northern people, at the ballot box. Now he told Cushing that as governor he could not even reply to the President’s letter; there was no hope to preserve the Union, and South Carolina would go ahead as planned. Preserving the amenities, he politely invited Cushing to witness the evening’s ceremonies connected with the signing.7
A mile from Secession Hall a militia regiment, the First South Carolina rifles, was in camp. A messenger galloped to the camp and the men were paraded, to listen to a reading of the ordinance and to cheer loudly. Newspapers were on the streets within fifteen minutes, and a Federal army officer from Fort Moultrie, looking on, felt that “the whole heart of the people had spoken.” The New York Times reporter suspected that some people had private doubts: “There is a lingering apprehension of anarchy which startles men in the home of their families … I am convinced that many a family is now experiencing the darkest forebodings.” Later, however, this reporter had to admit that everybody seemed happy, and he told how thousands of people joined in a parade that moved all through the downtown section, with music, banners, and transparencies: “The city was alive with pleasurable excitement.”8
But parades and fireworks and a general mingling in the streets could not go on forever, and on Saturday, December 22, the convention met again to consider what had to be done next. It had created a new nation, and for at least a time it would have to fill some of the functions of a revolutionary government, because many things must be done before independence could be a working reality. There were technicalities to consider. Over the years, the Congress at Washington had passed many laws; with the Union dissolved, were these laws still in force in South Carolina, and if they were not, how could confusion and anarchy be prevented? There were more material problems, as well, which must be considered without delay. In Charleston there were certain forts, built and maintained by United States authority. These were Fort Moultrie, lying amid the sand dunes and the summer cottages near the sea front on Sullivan’s Island, garrisoned by a handful of regulars; Castle Pinckney, a small masonry work on a mud flat not far from the Battery, held by one caretaking sergeant; Fort Johnson, a largely abandoned group of buildings on James Island facing the harbor, untenanted, of little apparent military value; and Fort Sumter, out at the entrance to the harbor, still unfinished, completely unoccupied except for the workmen who were taken out there by boat every morning and brought back to town every evening. By their mere existence, these forts demanded immediate attention.
The forts, the convention believed, by right belonged to South Carolina; three commissioners, accordingly, must be sent to Washington at once to negotiate for their transf
er, along with the transfer of lighthouses, arsenals, and other bits of real and personal property in South Carolina to which the government at Washington still held title.9
The forts would be taken over in due time. Meanwhile it was important to make the people of the United States understand the justice and logic behind secession; important, especially, to impress this on the attention of the people of the cotton belt, and to invite them to bring their states into a new Southern nation whose creation had begun with South Carolina’s action in Secession Hall on December 20.
Two documents were produced by December 24. The first was gravely headed “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It went on to assert that the benefits the Federal Constitution had been drawn up to secure had been defeated by the actions of the free states of the North: “Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.” This had been going on for a full quarter-century, and now a sectional party avowedly hostile to the South was about to take possession of the government. “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slave-holding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.” Therefore, the people of South Carolina, “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” had, in a word, seceded.
The other document was an address “to the People of the Slave-holding States of the United States,” and it was somewhat more pointed. It recited that the government of the United States had become a despotism, said that the Constitution was but an experiment that had failed—“the whole Constitution, by the constructions of the Northern people, has been absorbed by its preamble”—and came to a ringing peroration:
“Citizens of the Slave-holding States of the United States! Circumstances beyond our control have placed us in the van of the great controversy between the Northern and Southern States. We would have preferred that other States should have assumed the position we now occupy.… You have loved the Union, in whose service your great statesmen have labored and your great soldiers have fought and conquered—not for the material benefits it conferred, but with the faith of a generous and devoted chivalry. You have long lingered in hope over the shattered remains of a broken Constitution. Compromise after compromise, formed by your concessions, has been trampled under foot by your Northern confederates. All fraternity of feeling between the North and the South is lost, or has been converted into hate; and we, of the South, are at last driven together by the stern destiny which controls the existence of nations.… All we demand of other peoples is to be left alone, to work out our own high destinies. United together, we must be the most independent as we are the most important of the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace than our beneficent productions. United together and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread through the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slave-holding States.”10
The statement was forthright and revealing, touched with simple eloquence, expressing deep determination. Yet somehow it was not quite the sort of manifesto which men compose when they know they are going to have to make desperate war. It was written in the light of the faith that King Cotton was irresistible, and it hinted strongly at the belief that no one would be insane enough to take up arms against a united band of cotton states visibly in earnest. Implicit in all that was said and done was the conviction that the rest of the South would follow where South Carolina led, provided the leadership was vigorous and unhesitating. Ten days before the vote on the ordinance, the case had been expressed perfectly by South Carolina’s Congressman, William Porcher Miles, who urged speedy action because of the effect on the other slave states. Secessionists in the other states, he wrote, “tell us that any delay, under any pretext will demoralize them at home—while it will answer no possible good purpose.… We must move instantly or we injure our friends.”11 The immediate target was not so much the North as the remainder of the South.
The first reports from the deep South were good. The news from Charleston brought crowds into the streets at New Orleans; there were parades, bands again played the “Marseillaise,” a bust of John C. Calhoun was crowned with a blue cockade, and the press noted “a general demonstration of joy.” In Mobile there was a big parade, followed by the firing of a 100-gun salute; at Montgomery there was a similar salute, which was duplicated at Pensacola and at Wilmington. In Memphis a mass meeting commended the secessionists, and even in Virginia, which tended to be a little more reserved, there were demonstrations. A lofty “secession pole” bearing a palmetto flag was hoisted at Petersburg—to be cut down, during the night, by parties undetected—and there were flags and salutes at Norfolk and Portsmouth.12
But the response in the border states was less encouraging. Kentucky, where the new legislature would have a Unionist majority, was obviously going to wait and see, and the situation in Missouri seemed no brighter. The governor of Maryland, Thomas B. Hicks, was an avowed Unionist, and the first attempt to bring Maryland into the secessionist bloc met with failure. At the instigation of the Mississippi legislature, the Mississippi governor had appointed one A. H. Handy a commissioner to enlist Maryland’s support, and Hicks flatly rebuffed the man. Maryland, wrote Governor Hicks, although identified with the Southern states “in feeling and by the institutions and habits which prevail among us,” was above all things devoted to the Union; not until actual events had clearly shown that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution could not be obtained would Maryland have anything to do with an attempt to disrupt the Union.
Addressing a public meeting in Baltimore, Handy indicated that the movement for secession might be a deep political maneuver rather than an outright effort to set up a new nation.
“Secession,” he said, “is not intended to break up the present union but to perpetuate it. We do not propose to go out by way of breaking up or destroying the Union as our fathers gave it to us, but we go out for the purpose of getting further guarantees and security for our rights.… Our plan is for the Southern states to withdraw from the Union, for the present, to allow amendments to the Constitution to be made, guaranteeing our just rights; and if the Northern States will not make those amendments, by which these rights shall be secured to us, then we must secure them the best way we can. This question of slavery must be settled now or never.”13
It was a game for high stakes, and no one could be sure just how the cards were going to fall. If Mr. Handy spoke for the secessionist leaders as a group—which, in view of the fact that they included some of the most self-assured individualists ever born in America, may be somewhat doubtful—the gamble was very delicate indeed. The people whose votes had made Lincoln President-elect may not have known precisely what they were doing when they voted for him, but it was obvious that they had been deeply moved by something, and to assume that a declaration of cotton-belt independence would quickly cause them to give up that something and make liberal concessions was to make a very long gamble. The significant clause in Mr. Handy’s remarks was still his assertion that if the South could not win her rights by negotiation, “then we must secure them the best way we can.”
Unhappiest man in America just now was almost certainly President James Buchanan. On that portentous twentieth of December, the President had attended a wedding in the home of friends, in Washington, and early in the evening he had blandly assured his hostess that his health and spirits were of the
best. “I have never enjoyed better health nor a more tranquil spirit,” he said. “I have not lost an hour’s sleep nor a single meal.” A little later that evening, with Buchanan sitting in the drawing room while most of the other guests were strolling about looking at the wedding presents, there were noises and bustlings at the front door. Buchanan glanced over his shoulder, and then (strangely echoing old Mr. Petigru’s remark, made that same evening) he asked his hostess: “Madam, do you suppose the house is on fire? I hear an unusual commotion in the hall.” The hostess went to the door and encountered Congressman Lawrence Keitt, of South Carolina, who bore a telegram and an air of great excitement; the telegram informed him that his state had just voted to secede, and he was shaking it in the air and crying “Thank God! Thank God!”
The hostess bore this news to the President. Later on, she remembered the response she got. “He looked at me, stunned, for a moment. Falling back and grasping the arms of his chair, he whispered: ‘Madam, might I beg you to have my carriage called?’ ”14 The carriage came, and Buchanan rode off to the White House. The crisis he had hoped to avoid was at last upon him … and upon the country.
2: A Delegation of Authority
The forts at Charleston had begun to draw attention to themselves early in November. They drew attention, or attention was thrust upon them; it can be said either way, and it makes no difference, since it was the mere fact that the forts existed at all that was so stirring and so perilous. They were wholly inert little plots of ground surrounded by masonry, either obsolescent or unfinished, made to drowse under the Southern sun, looking seaward. Yet time had moved over them, transforming everything, so that the most prosaic of objects or actions—even the fact that little pyramids of freshly tarred cannon balls were stacked in the rear of the gun carriages, even the matter of having a sentry walking post atop a parapet, or of hoisting a familiar flag every morning and hauling it down at sunset—these had suddenly started to cast fearful shadows. They symbolized an unbearable aggression against the safety of a state which, trying to become a nation, bristled with immense pride and a certain unsure arrogance.