by Bruce Catton
The governor’s reply came back within hours, and it was equally stiff and formal. South Carolina was an independent nation; the action of the United States in putting troops in Fort Sumter, and then in sending reinforcements, was clearly an act of aggression; and the firing from Morris Island and Fort Moultrie was abundantly justified. If Major Anderson felt that he must use his own guns now, the responsibility was his own: “Your position in this harbor has been tolerated by the authorities of the State, and … it is not perceived how far the conduct which you propose to adopt can find a parallel in the history of any country, or be reconciled with any other purpose of your Government than that of imposing upon this State the condition of a conquered province.”11
Governor Pickens had touched the point precisely. There was no parallel in the history of any country for the things that were being done these days, and neither governor, major, nor anyone else had any clear rules for guidance. Young Lieutenant J. Norman Hall, of the Sumter garrison, had taken Major Anderson’s letter ashore under a flag of truce, and he reported that the city of Charleston was in an uproar—the word had gone about that Fort Sumter was about to bombard the town and that the lieutenant had come ashore to give due warning, and an excited crowd was on the streets. When he returned to his boat with Governor Pickens’s letter of reply, Lieutenant Hall was accompanied to the dock by one of the governor’s aides and an armed escort. On the dock he found anxious citizens questioning his boat’s crew and learning nothing.12
The citizens learned nothing because no final decision had been made; there was nothing anyone could tell them. Both Major Anderson and Governor Pickens were holding firm, each man bound on a collision course, but there was still time for second thoughts. On January 11 a steamer came out to the fort bearing representatives from the governor—D. F. Jamison, president of the secession convention, and Judge A. G. McGrath, South Carolina’s Secretary of State. The representatives landed with some difficulty—their steamer ran aground near the fort, and a small boat was sent out to get them—and they went to Major Anderson’s room, giving him a letter in which Governor Pickens, moved by “considerations of the gravest public character,” urged the surrender of Fort Sumter to the South Carolina authorities.
This was not quite the ultimatum it appeared to be. There was discussion, in which Judge McGrath assured the major that “it is not an alternative that is offered to you by the Governor, it is not peace or war that he offers in making this communication to you; it is done more to give you an opportunity, after understanding all of the circumstances, to prevent bloodshed.” Major Anderson replied that he was glad to know this. He would not surrender the fort unless his government told him to do so, but he wanted to prevent bloodshed as much as any man could—and, in the end, he would do this: he would send an officer to Washington to report and to ask further instructions, and if the governor wanted to send his own man to Washington, to demand the fort’s surrender at the top, the two men might go together. He embodied these thoughts in a letter to Governor Pickens, closing with an expression of his regret that “you have made a demand with which I cannot comply.”
It was so arranged, at last. Once more, the center of gravity shifted from the fort to the White House. Something faintly resembling a truce ensued. Arrangements were devised to send the women and children of the garrison to New York, it was made possible for Major Anderson to get day-to-day supplies of fresh meat and vegetables from the Charleston markets, and both the demand for surrender and the threat to close the port were held in abeyance. Meanwhile, Governor Pickens’s troops continued to build more batteries to bear on the fort and the entrance to the harbor, and the Fort Sumter garrison worked unceasingly to get more guns mounted, to block up embrasures that would not be used, and to get ready for a fight or a siege.13
A breathing spell, in short: brought on, perhaps, by a sudden realization in Charleston that an armed clash right now might be fatal to Southern hopes.
Once again, the secessionists had overplayed their hand. The South Carolina gunners who fired on the Star of the West had, in effect, invited the Federal government to start the war then and there if it wanted a war; but in plain fact a war begun just then could have been very one-sided. South Carolina was the only state that had actually seceded. (Mississippi was to vote for secession that very day, and Florida would follow the day after, but at the moment South Carolina stood alone.) There was no Southern Confederacy—no government, no chain of organization, no army except for the South Carolina militia: there was, in short, nothing to fight a war with, and this fact was beginning to dawn on the Southern leaders. Early in the month, Governor Pickens’s chief military adviser had written earnestly “to express my conviction of the inexpediency of commencing actual hostilities, on our side, in our present wholly unprepared state,” and he had said that “nothing but bloody discomfiture must attend the opening campaign.”14 After the meeting between Major Anderson and the governor’s people, Jefferson Davis, in Washington, sent similar words of caution. Senator Davis had led troops in combat and he had been Secretary of War, and he understood that a shooting war was not to be begun lightly. To Governor Pickens he wrote soberly:
“The opinion of your friends … is adverse to the presentation of a demand for the evacuation of Fort Sumter. The little garrison in its present position presses on nothing but a point of pride & to you I need not say that war is made up of real elements. It is a physical problem from the solution of which we must need exclude all sentiment. I hope we shall soon have a Southern Confederacy, shall soon be ready to do all which interest or even pride demands, & in the fullness of a redemption of every obligation the more impatient will find indemnity for any chafing in the meantime they would have to endure. We have much of preparation to make both in military and civil organization and the time which serves for our preparation, by its moral effect, tends also towards a peaceful solution.… The occurrence of the Star of the West seems to me to put you in the best condition for delay so long as the government permits the matter to rest where it is—your friends here think you can well afford to stand still so far as the presence of a garrison is concerned, and if things should continue as they are for a month we shall then be in a condition to speak with a voice which all must hear & heed.”15
Governor Pickens agreed, writing in reply that “the truth is I have not been prepared to take Sumter.” The fort was strong, the state was weak, its military supplies were deficient, and everything was “on a small militia scale.” He needed time. Let the Southern states form a government of their own, pooling their resources under a commander-in-chief—who, said the governor, should be Mr. Davis himself—and then something might be done; then it was to be hoped that “the slave holding race will present such a union as will secure the protection & development of our civilization in any emergency that may arise.”16
The demand for the surrender of the fort, accordingly, would not be pressed. The situation would remain explosive, and if either side wanted a final decision, the gun was loaded and cocked, ready to hand; but Charleston would be uncharacteristically static, with the important developments taking place elsewhere.
There was, to be sure, a certain amount of continued sputtering. The man Governor Pickens sent to Washington was his Attorney-General, J. W. Hayne, who was accompanied by Lieutenant Hall, from Fort Sumter. Hall made his report to the War Department, and Hayne delivered a letter to the White House. Buchanan, who refused to talk with Hayne in person, appears to have felt that a binding truce had been agreed to in Charleston, and that nothing could be done by either side until a formal reply to Governor Pickens’s demand had been delivered to the governor. He let Secretary of War Holt write the reply, and Holt acted as if South Carolina had simply offered to buy Fort Sumter from the United States; he pointed out (to the intense irritation of Mr. Hayne) that the Federal government’s title to the fort was “complete and incontestible” and remarked that the President had no Constitutional power to cede or surrender the place. For
the rest, Sumter would not now be reinforced because Major Anderson did not think reinforcements were needed, but if the situation changed, reinforcements would be sent.17
Mr. Hayne was indignant. He sent an angry letter, not to Holt, but to President Buchanan himself, and he indicated that Southern pride was outraged by the notion that South Carolina was merely trying to buy a fort; it was difficult, he said, for him to see in this anything other than “an intentional misconstruction.” South Carolina, he insisted, (growing somewhat shrill) was a separate and independent government: “and how, with this patent fact before you, you can consider the continued occupation of a fort in her harbor a pacific measure and parcel of a peaceful policy, passes certainly my comprehension.”18 The letter delivered, Mr. Hayne took himself off to Charleston. The interchange meant little, except that President Buchanan had made his administration’s policy firm and official: there was no such thing as peaceful secession, and South Carolina (in the eyes of the government at Washington) was still legally a part of the Union. This President was not, after all, quite as weak as he looked; he had committed himself to a policy which Abraham Lincoln would continue when he reached the White House.
Meanwhile, the situation grew ever so much more complicated. Secession was spreading, and the creation of that Southern Confederacy which Senator Davis and Governor Pickens had been talking about drew steadily nearer. Mississippi left the Union on January 9, Florida went out on January 10, and Alabama followed on January 11. Eight days later Georgia seceded, to be followed a week later by Louisiana. Forts and arsenals were seized—without any armed clash, largely because most of the places taken over were held by nothing but caretaker detachments. Arsenals at Baton Rouge and Augusta and at Mount Vernon, Alabama, passed under state control, along with a string of forts—Pulaski, Ship Island, Morgan and Gaines, Jackson and St. Philip, Barrancas, Marion; all along the Southern coast the United States flag was coming down and state flags were going up, with enthusiastic militiamen moving in to take the place of Federal regulars.
It was a little confusing. A revolution was in progress, yet it was adhering to protocol as far as it could—clumsily, because protocol for such a situation had never been devised, but with the best of intentions. Just before Alabama seceded, a Congressman from that state wrote to Secretary Holt asking for the plan of the magazines in the Mount Vernon arsenal, and Holt replied, straight-faced, that he would cheerfully comply with this request “did not the interests of the service in the present condition of affairs forbid the publication of information of that description.” Militia officers who seized the Federal installations solemnly gave receipts to the dispossessed, and Ordnance Captain Jesse L. Reno sent Holt a report explaining that he had not been able to hold the Mount Vernon arsenal because four companies of militia had clambered over the walls at daybreak and were upon him before he knew anything was up: “I trust the Department will not hold me responsible for this unexpected catastrophe.”19 His standing would remain good; he would become a major general and he would die in battle at South Mountain, in Maryland, a year and a half later.
There was an occasional mix-up. Moved by a false report that Federal troops were coming down on them, citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina, swarmed out on January 9 and seized Forts Johnston and Caswell, over the loud protests of the two caretakers—Ordnance Sergeant James Reilly, at Fort Johnston, and Ordnance Sergeant Frederick Dardingkiller, at Fort Caswell. A few days later Governor John W. Ellis sternly ordered the forts returned—North Carolina had not seceded, and there was considerable doubt whether it ever would—and the two ordnance sergeants, who had demanded receipts for the sequestered property, told the insurgents they would take the public property back “if there was none of it broken, or none of the ammunition expended.” Sergeant Reilly notified the War Department that the men who had seized the forts “were not sustained by the people which brought them into it,” and concluded his report with the remark: “I hope that the conduct of me and Sergeant Dardingkiller will be approved by the Department, as we took the responsibility of taking the stores back for the best interest of the public service.” Governor Ellis notified Secretary Holt that his people were apt to make real trouble if any troops were sent to the two forts, and Holt gravely assured him that the government considered the forts entirely safe, “under the shelter of that law-abiding sentiment for which the people of North Carolina have ever been distinguished.”20
As the cotton states, one after another, formally passed ordinances of secession, it became clear that not everyone in the Deep South wanted to leave the Union. Even in Mississippi and Alabama there were men who argued boldly and with some public support against secession, and in the North men like Lincoln felt that there was a strong vein of loyalty to the Union all across the South if it could only be tapped. But this hope was largely a delusion. Loyalty to the Union did indeed exist, but the feeling that the states’ claims ran deeper could sweep it away, and men who fought to keep secession from happening would support secession once it became a fact. In Alabama, Delegate Jeremiah Clemens told the state convention that secession was nothing more or less than treason, a great wrong which he would defeat if he could; but if secession was finally voted, “I am a son of Alabama: her destiny is mine … calmly and deliberately, I walk into revolution.” In the same way the Mississippi anti-secessionist James L. Alcorn, having lost his fight, solemnly announced his decision in classical terms: “The die is cast—the Rubicon is crossed—and I enlist myself in the army that marches on Rome.”21
The sheer sweep of dramatic events carried many men along. As had been the case with the marching Wide-Awakes in the North during the summer campaign, there was a rising sense of identification with a powerful movement; no one knew quite where the Southern states were going, but at least they were on the march and it was exciting to be a part of it. When the people of Mobile, for instance, celebrated the passing of the ordinance of secession by firing a 100-gun salute, setting off rockets and parading all across the downtown area to the sound of a brass band, they displayed an enthusiasm that was bound to be highly contagious. In Jackson, Mississippi, secession was celebrated by a parade led by a man swinging a large blue silken banner with one white star on its field; music-hall comedian Harry Macarthy saw it, was stirred, and quickly dashed off a song that was to be one of the great swinging battle songs of the Confederacy—“The Bonnie Blue Flag.” All of Jackson sang it next day, and most of the South was singing it within weeks. The convention that voted Mississippi out of the Union voted also that the state’s most distinguished son, Jefferson Davis, should be major general commanding the independent state’s armed forces.
It was not entirely clear, even yet, just where all of the marching and singing and voting would take people. Secession was real, voted by men deeply in earnest—and yet there might still be room for an arrangement; the people of the North might yet give way when they understood that the people of the South really meant what they said. Congressmen J. L. Pugh and J. L. M. Curry, of Alabama, writing the day before their state’s delegates voted for secession, said that their friends in the Northern and border states believed that “the secession of the cotton states is an indispensable basis for a reconstruction of the Union”: it would put an end to coercion, and if the idea of coercion could be abandoned, perhaps all of the nation’s troubles could somehow be solved.22
Yet the chance for harmony was growing very dim, one reason being that each faction expected someone else to make the compromises, another being that the drift of events carried its own hard logic. Buchanan’s cabinet had now lost the last trace of pro-Southern feeling.23 Jacob Thompson had resigned, his place as Secretary of the Interior being filled by Chief Clerk Moses Kelly, who was serving as acting secretary; and Philip Thomas, after one month’s service as Secretary of the Treasury, had likewise quit, to be replaced by an energetic and uncompromising Unionist, former Senator John A. Dix, of New York. Dix lost very little time letting people know where he stood. Immediately af
ter the secession of Louisiana, a Treasury agent went to New Orleans to see if anything could be saved from the wreckage. He found that the mint and the customs house had already been seized by state authorities, but he hoped that he could save the two revenue cutters that were berthed there, and he ordered them moved to New York. Captain J. G. Breshwood, of the cutter McClelland, flatly refused, and when the agent reported this fact, Dix wired that he was to put the captain under arrest as a mutineer, following with the uncompromising order: “If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.” The order made a stir in the North, where more and more people were in a mood to welcome a note of firmness, but it had no effect in New Orleans because it was never delivered. Captain Breshwood was not arrested, no one was shot, the cutter stayed where it was, and the flag did come down; the rising tide, having flooded forts and arsenals, had gone high enough to swamp a revenue cutter as well, and the Secretary’s firm words had no effect.24
6: “Everything, Even Life Itself”
The Senate chamber was crowded on the morning of January 21. People had started moving toward the Capitol at daybreak, and by nine o’clock there was hardly standing room in the galleries or in the cloakrooms; there were foreign ministers in the diplomatic gallery, and when the doors to the outer halls swung open, the expectant faces of women, “like a mosaic of flowers,” could be seen. As the routine business of the morning hour was disposed of, the chamber grew hushed, simple human curiosity blending with a tragic feeling that a long era in the nation’s life was today being brought to a close. The Senators from the seceding cotton states were to speak their good-bys this morning; most notably, Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, gaunt and haggard, coming for the last time to this room where he had helped to make so much history.