by Bruce Catton
The liner Baltic drew too much water to come in over the bar, and so the steamer Ysabel was sent in to take off the garrison. Shortly after the noon hour on Sunday, April 14, the final ceremony was held, the men of the garrison looking glum, Major Anderson near to tears with emotion, Charleston harbor all crammed with boats full of people, local wherrymen doing a land-office business rowing sight-seers past the fort at fifty cents a head. There would be this final salute … but things that were planned in connection with Fort Sumter always went awry.
The salute was being fired by one of the big guns on the barbette. Some burning fragment of a powder bag was caught by the wind and dropped on a pile of ready cartridges behind the piece, and there was a sudden explosion—and the only loss of life caused by the great battle of Fort Sumter took place here and now, twenty-four hours after the fighting had stopped. (One of the fantastic things about Fort Sumter was that about 4000 shells were fired altogether, without killing anyone on either side.) Private Daniel Hough, a regular artillerist, was instantly killed, and five other soldiers were wounded, one so gravely that he died a few days later in a Charleston hospital. Private Hough was buried in the fort, with a company of South Carolina volunteers presenting arms and a Confederate naval chaplain conducting services. Then the band struck up “Yankee Doodle,” the United States troops marched out to the waiting transport, the Confederate and Palmetto flags soared to the top of the flag pole, and guns all around the harbor fired a jubilant salute. Beauregard came out to make formal inspection of the fort, along with Governor Pickens and other notables. Captain Lee, examining the place with the professional eye of a military engineer, found it badly damaged and estimated that it would cost at least $350,000 to make suitable repairs.14
Out at sea, the transports and the warships steamed north for Sandy Hook.
6: The Coming of the Fury
Dining with three cabinet members not long after the fall of Fort Sumter, Winfield Scott expressed complete confidence in Northern victory, but doubted that there would be an early end to the nation’s troubles. For a long time to come, he said, it would require the exercise of all of the powers of government “to restrain the fury of the noncombatants.”1
This fury was an elemental force that swept through North and South in precisely the same way, and it was going across the land like a flame. It did not look like fury at first; it was wild, laughing, extravagant, armed with flags and music and the power of speech, groping insistently for heavier weapons. The coming of war had released it. Something unendurable had ended; the uncertainty and the doubt were gone, along with the need to examine mind and heart for unattainable answers, and a Boston merchant looked about him at the crowds, the waving banners, and the general jubilation and wrote: “The heather is on fire. I never before knew what a popular excitement can be.” The London Times’s Mr. Russell, stopping in North Carolina on his way to Charleston, saw the same thing—“flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths,” with men shouting so stridently for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy (to which North Carolina had not yet attached itself) that the bands playing “Dixie” could not be heard. Men slapped strangers on the backs, women tossed bunches of flowers from windows, and in Richmond a crowd paraded to the Tredegar Iron Works under a Confederate flag, dragged a cannon to the steps of the state Capitol, and fired a salute. Some fundamental emotion had slipped the leash; it would control both President Lincoln and President Davis, and yet at the same time it was a force which the two men themselves would have to control in order to make war.2
Dazzled by the overwhelming public response to the news that one flag had gone down and another had gone up, ordinarily sensible men gave way to uncritical vaporing. Youthful John Hay, the somewhat condescending ornament of the White House secretariat, looked at a company of untried Northern militia and wrote: “When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes—all for a principle—it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army.” Hard indeed; particularly so since exactly the same sort of men were doing exactly the same things in the South for a diametrically opposed principle, creating boundless possibilities of their own. Leroy Pope Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, told a serenading crowd in Montgomery that the Confederate flag “will, before the first of May, float over the dome of the old capitol in Washington,” and he went on to say that if Southern chivalry were pushed too far, the flag might eventually rise over Faneuil Hall in Boston. The eminent German-American Carl Schurz wrote admiringly that “millionaires’ sons rushed to the colors by the side of laborers,” and correspondent Russell noted that barefooted poor whites in the deepest South were whooping it up for Confederate independence as loyally as the wealthiest planters.3
Through the fall and winter, events had seemed to move slowly, as if fate wanted to give men a chance to have second thoughts about what was being done. Now everything began to go with a rush, and what was done would be done for keeps. White House routine had gone about as usual on April 13, when Anderson was driven to surrender. Lincoln received visitors, signed papers, worried about patronage. The cabinet met briefly, but in the absence of conclusive news it could do very little. During the morning Lincoln met with a delegation from the Virginia secession convention. What this convention would inevitably do was strongly indicated by the news in the morning papers; Roger Pryor had cried “Strike a blow!” and the blow had been struck, once and for all. Still, there was time for a word from the President, and Lincoln had written out a brief statement: a cautious indication of future policy, saying much less than was on the President’s mind.
If it proved true, he said, that Fort Sumter had actually been attacked, he would perhaps suspend the delivery of United States mails in the states that claimed to have seceded, for he believed that the commencement of actual war against the government justified and perhaps required such a step. He still considered all military posts and property in the secessionist states to be Federal property, and he continued to stand by the policy laid down in the inaugural—to hold, occupy and possess such places. He would not try to collect duties and imposts by armed invasion of any part of the country, but at the same time he might conceivably land an armed force, in case of need, to relieve a fort along the borders.… The delegates went away as wise as when they came but probably no wiser.4
Lincoln would do a great deal more than he had told the Virginians that Saturday, because he clearly had concluded that the time for temporizing had gone. Whatever might or might not have been done, once the firing began at Fort Sumter, Lincoln was ready to make war. If the border states could stand the shock and would go along, well and good; if not, they could go where they chose. He would fight the theory and the fact of secession with all the power at his disposal, letting what had happened at Charleston stand as a declaration of war. On Sunday, April 14, when news that Anderson had hauled down his flag reached Washington, Lincoln met with his cabinet again, and talked to his military advisers, and on Monday morning he issued a proclamation—an announcement that the war was on, and a statement (as far as one could be made at this moment) of the policy that would guide him in the conduct of that war. It went to the country on April 15. After reciting the obvious fact that “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by ordinary law courts and marshals had taken charge of affairs in the seven secessionist states, it announced that the several states of the Union were called on to contribute 75,000 militia “in order to suppress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed.” It continued:
“I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long endured.
“I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property
which have been seized from the Union; and in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.
“And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse, and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.
“Deeming that the present condition of public affairs presents an extraordinary occasion, I do hereby, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, convene both Houses of Congress. Senators and Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at their respective chambers, at 12 o’clock noon, on Thursday, the fourth day of July, next, then and there to consider and determine such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand.”5
This was clear enough, and it went substantially beyond the threat to suspend the mail service and reinforce beleaguered garrisons which he had mentioned to the Virginia delegation two days earlier. It was a flat announcement that the unbroken Union would be fought for, a promise that slavery would not be disturbed—the word “property” had a very specific meaning in those days—and a clear indication that this President would aggressively use all of his powers right up to the hilt. It was mid-April now, and Congress would not meet until early in July. Until then, Abraham Lincoln would be the government, free to act as he chose with no restraint except the knowledge that he would have to give Congress an accounting ten or eleven weeks later—by which time everything Congress did would be done under the incalculable pressure of wartime emergency.
As an experienced politician, Lincoln had looked to his fences before he acted. The Republicans were bound to support him; he was also assured that his decision to go to war would be publicly endorsed by Stephen A. Douglas, which meant that the Democratic party in the Northern states would support the war.
On Sunday evening Congressman George Ashmun, a Massachusetts Republican, called on Douglas at the Senator’s home in Washington and urged him to go at once to the White House and tell the President he would do all he could to help him “put down the rebellion which had thus fiercely flamed out in Charleston harbor.” Douglas demurred; Lincoln had been firing good Democratic office-holders, many of them friends of Douglas, in order to make jobs for Republicans, and, anyway, Douglas was not sure that Lincoln wanted any advice from him. Ashmun insisted and at last won Douglas over, with the help of Mrs. Douglas, and the two men went to the White House. Lincoln received them cordially, and read to Douglas the proclamation he would issue in the morning. Douglas endorsed it wholeheartedly, but told Lincoln to call out 200,000 men instead of 75,000. Reflecting on the bruises he had received in the Charleston convention at the hands of the cotton-state leaders, Douglas warned: “You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do.” The President and the man who had opposed him then went to a map, and Douglas pointed to strategic spots that ought to be strengthened—Washington, Harper’s Ferry, Fort Monroe, and the muddy Illinois town of Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. They parted at last, and Douglas wrote out and gave to the Associated Press a brief statement, telling the country that although he remained a political opponent of the President, “he was prepared to sustain the President in the exercise of all his Constitutional functions to preserve the Union and maintain the Government and defend the Federal capital.”6
For a few months, at least, the Democratic party in the North would support the war, and in this third week of April it seemed that all of the North was an enthusiastic and patriotic unit. The heather was truly on fire. There were “war meetings” everywhere, mayors made speeches, citizens paraded, and military recruiting stations were swamped. State governors who had worried for fear they could not meet the enlistment quotas set by the War Department found they had many times as many applicants as the quotas would accommodate, and began to wonder how they could pacify all of the indignant voters who wanted to go to war and could not be accepted. City after city named committees of public safety, the committee members usually having the loftiest of motives and the haziest of ideas as to their duties. A Southern woman temporarily resident in New England wrote to friends that the intense fervor that was sweeping Massachusetts was not patriotism but simple hatred for the South, but she felt that these Yankees were in earnest whatever their motive, and she voiced a warning: “I would not advise you of the South to trust too much in the idea that the Northerners will not fight, for I believe they will, and their numbers are overwhelming.”7 Sober businessmen of Cincinnati met and agreed that they would ship no more goods south—an agreement that languished and died in due course, for Cincinnati was to be an active supply depot for Confederate smugglers of contraband throughout the war.
But if the proclamation moved the North to a wild, almost discordant harmony, it knocked Virginia straight out of the Union and turned the war into a life-or-death affair for the whole nation.
Lincoln had said that to trade a fort for a state, Sumter for Virginia, might be an excellent bargain, although his efforts to drive such a bargain had been tardy and ineffective. Now both fort and state were gone, and their joint departure meant that the war would be long and desperate. Without Virginia the Southern Confederacy could not have hoped to win its war for independence; with Virginia the Confederacy’s hopes were not half bad, and they would get even better when people realized that Virginia would come equipped with Robert E. Lee. American history has known few events more momentous than the secession of Virginia, which turned what set out to be the simple suppression of a rebellion into a four-year cataclysm that shook America to the profoundest depths of its being. Once the proclamation was out, Virginia’s departure was almost automatic.
People in Richmond were celebrating the fall of Fort Sumter before they saw Lincoln’s proclamation, and a mass meeting on April 15 resolved “that we rejoice with high, exultant, heartfelt joy at the triumph of the Southern Confederacy over the accursed government at Washington.”8 In the midst of this jubilation came the news that the accursed government expected Virginia to provide three regiments of infantry for the purpose of destroying the joyously congratulated Confederacy. To a proud tidewater people who had seen Yankee coercion in the mere fact that the United States flag had been flying over a fort in South Carolina, this call for troops—this obvious, bluntly stated determination to make war-looked like coercion triply distilled and outrageously unbearable. Virginia’s refusal to join the Confederacy during the winter had never meant anything more than a desire to wait and see, a thin hope that the deep South might yet get all it wanted without having to establish a brand-new nation. Having waited, Virginia now had seen; the thin little hope was dead; and Virginia would be out of the Union just as soon as the most meager formalities could be attended to.
Virginia’s Governor Letcher gave abundant warning of what was to come when, on April 16, he sent Lincoln a reply to the request for militia.
“In reply to this communication,” said the governor, “I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object—an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795—will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South.”
As Governor Letcher felt, so felt most of the other border-state governors, and messages of angry defiance poured in on Lincoln as soon as his call for troops was received. From Kentucky, Governor Beriah Magoffin telegraphed: “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states.” Governor John W. Ellis, of North Carolina, wired that the request for troops was so shocking that he could hardly believe it to be genuine: it was both a
violation of the Constitution and a “gross usurpation of power,” he would have no part of it, and “you can get no troops from North Carolina.” From Governor Isham G. Harris, of Tennessee, came the statement: “Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purpose of coercion, but 50,000 if necessary, for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brethren.” Governor H. M. Rector, of Arkansas, said that his state would send no troops; the people of Arkansas would “defend to the last extremity their honor, lives and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation.” And Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, of Missouri, refusing to join in “the unholy crusade,” telegraphed to Lincoln that his call for troops was “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.”9 It had seemed of the first importance to hold the border states in the Union, but within the week following Major Anderson’s surrender it looked as if the border might go over to the Confederacy en bloc. The nation that was going to war to preserve its unity might well find the war lost before it had fairly begun.
Most important of all was Virginia; and in Virginia, it quickly developed, the overwhelming majority of the people (east of the Blue Ridge, at any rate) felt precisely as Governor Letcher felt. Virginia’s secession convention had never adjourned, and the call for troops galvanized it into quick action. On April 17 the convention passed an ordinance of secession. Technically, this would become effective only if a majority of the voters of the state ratified it at a special election called for May 23, but by now there was not the slightest chance that the voters would reject it and everyone took it for granted that Virginia had made an irrevocable decision. Until the action at Fort Sumter, there had been a good Unionist majority in the convention, but Delegate W. C. Rives wrote to a friend in Boston that “Lincoln’s unlucky and ill-conceived proclamation” had caused an immediate reversal. The ordinance passed by a vote of 88 to 55, most of the pro-Union votes being cast by delegates from the western part of the state, beyond the mountains. Governor Letcher promptly issued a proclamation pointing out that seven states had already “solemnly resumed the power granted by them to the United States,” asserting that Lincoln’s call for troops was unconstitutional and a grave threat to Virginia, and summoning all of the state’s volunteer regiments or companies in the state to stand by for an immediate call to active duty.10