As the presidents agonized, the people of South Carolina clamored for military action. Their rage for war soon became a paradigm for citizens everywhere. Unlike President Davis and his cabinet, who contemplated armed conflict with trepidation, Charlestonians could scarcely contain their excitement and enthusiasm at the prospect of war. On April 10, the Charleston Daily Courier declared defiantly: “Let the strife begin ... we have no fear of the issue.” In the North, Frederick Douglass wrote an editorial in which he said: “Let the conflict come!”7
Clearly, the Courier’s cry of “no fear” referenced manly virtues of martial valor. But it could just as easily have applied to ethics. There was no moral fear of “strife” anywhere. Instead, on April 11, crowds gathered to view the gallantry, only to be disappointed by quiet. A writer for the Charleston Mercury expressed the relish for war and sense of corporate disappointment at its delay:On the battery several hundreds of persons, principally ladies, were promenading until near midnight, anxiously gazing at the dim lights, barely visible through the haze, which indicated the position of the batteries, where fathers and sons, brothers and lovers were willing to sacrifice their lives for the honor of South Carolina. And yet there was but one regret expressed, and that was at the delay and procrastination of hostilities. A detachment of the Citadel Cadets are stationed here for night service, with some heavy pieces of artillery.8
At Davis’s order, Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker sent Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard instructions to demand the immediate evacuation of the fort. Beauregard duly issued the demand. Despite his Southern friends, Major Anderson refused the order, maintaining his loyalties to the Union.
At precisely 4:30 a.m., on April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons opened fire on the fort. The surprisingly feisty Federal defenders returned fire and held out for hours. But with fires on all sides and depleted munitions, Anderson had no choice but to surrender. From the shoreline, Charlestonians rejoiced to see the Palmetto flag of South Carolina replace the Stars and Stripes over the fortress. In all, one horse was killed.
With the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, twenty years of accumulated frustration, occasional violence, and overheated rhetoric at last ignited a war whose outcome was unknown to everyone. Upon receiving word of the surrender, an uncertain President Davis confided that the bombardment would mark “either the beginning of a fearful war, or the end of a political contest.”9 In fact, it brought about both.
Despite the prodigious bombardment of Federal property and the surrender of the U.S. Army, there was no certainty in the seceded South that this would actually lead to a full-scale war. Earlier acts of violence in Kansas and Missouri, to say nothing of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, had aroused fury but had not ushered in war, and nothing overly ominous occurred on April 12. Indeed, as “first shots” go, Sumter was a remarkably banal event, unlike the American Revolution’s “shot heard round the world” or a later generation’s Pearl Harbor: no one died in combat at Sumter. As the “act of aggression” that would eventually create a “just war” on both sides, Sumter was almost trivial. Yet, because the looming war was, like the Revolution, ultimately political and popular, the consequences were anything but trivial.
Following the capture of Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was not about to declare war on the Union. Davis knew that would be an act of aggression entitling the Northern states to take the defensive position. Rather, the Confederates characterized their actions as a simple removal of an unwanted foreign presence from their sovereign territory. As explained by the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, there were occasions when apparently preemptive strikes on one’s own territory were just. Offensive wars of conquest were not, he declared, determined by “he who strikes the first blow ... but the first who renders force necessary.”10
In Washington, D.C., President Lincoln refused to pursue peace at the expense of capitulation, but neither was he willing to call Congress to session for a declaration of war. Instead, he took matters into his own hands and, on April 14, issued a provocative call to arms. With cabinet approval, but without congressional assent, he authorized the procurement of seventy-five thousand volunteers from the free-state militias for a period of ninety days. Their mission was limited: to dismantle “combinations” in Confederate states “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”11 Lincoln further called for a special session of Congress to meet two and a half months later on July 4. The following day, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for volunteers and declared that a state of “insurrection” existed, requiring an armed response.
President Davis responded in kind. On April 17 he issued a proclamation calling for thirty-two thousand volunteers. This was necessary, he claimed, because Lincoln “had announced his intention of invading the Confederacy with an armed force, for the purpose of capturing its fortresses, and thereby subverting its independence and subjecting the free people thereof to the dominion of a foreign power.”12 Davis’s words and actions, like Lincoln’s, amounted to a declaration of war. In fact, both could fairly be charged with starting the war, since neither was at all inclined to back down.13
Just as Lincoln wrongly assumed that there was a majority of antislavery Unionists in the South, so too the South was wrong about a majority of abolitionists in the North. In fact, the majority of white Southerners were proslavery, while the majority of white Northerners were not abolitionists.
Having issued orders for mobilization, both commanders in chief faced the question of whether they would have a viable army. The rage for war in the North and South ensured there would be no lack of volunteers. But who would lead them? For months before and after Sumter, both presidents looked anxiously to the United States Military Academy at West Point and its “long gray line” of graduates, for it would determine, in large measure, the success or failure of their national armies. Indeed, no military institution would be more critical than West Point.
Until 1860 West Point had been able to survive not only external threats but also internal divisions from a diverse corps that represented every state and section in the country, as well as every religion. Its mission was primarily to serve as an engineering school for American armed forces. The Military Academy’s location, on the west bank of the Hudson River, was decidedly “North,” but its culture was patrician and equally “South.” Honor and duty ruled at West Point and had the nation as their object of devotion.
By training and creed, academy officers and cadets embodied American might and power. A breed apart, they had little in common with the outside world and its preoccupations. Their bond was their honor to one another, and their comradeship larger than life. They eschewed all creeds save America and subordinated all religious observations to the American mission. Alone among American institutions of higher learning, West Point resisted the evangelical revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” as divisive and in bad taste. From its origins, the Military Academy had remained a quasi-Episcopal establishment. Jewish cadets worshipped on Sundays like everyone else, for nothing could transcend the West Point religion. In fact, West Point celebrated the religion of America, and for that purpose trained a cadre of warriors whose divine mandate was unqualified love of country.
With only about seventy students in each class, all the cadets knew one another—a fact that would become extremely important in the emerging Civil War. Students endured a regimen of intense “character formation” that amounted to overwhelming indoctrination. One nineteenth-century teacher commented: “It stands in loco parentis not only over the mental but the moral, physical and, so to speak, the official man. It dominates every phase of his development.... There is very little of his time over which it does not exercise a close scrutiny, and for which it does not demand a rigid accountability.”14
West Point cadets and officers were taught also to be “gentlemen.” The term “gentleman” carried with it powerful moral imperatives of “honor” and justness in the conduct of
war. Through intensive training and indoctrination, cadets imbibed a code that stressed the ideal of a “limited war.” The tactics, such as they were, taught by Dennis Mahan, a professor of civil and military engineering, stressed the reserve use of interior lines of operations and campaigns of position and maneuver against armies rather than crushing overland campaigns across civilian populations.15 This West Point Code demanded that real gentlemen protect the innocents and minimize destruction to achieve desired ends.16 But this never meant timidity or intimidation in the face of combat against organized armies. Here fearlessness and ruthlessness ruled. Lived experiences in the Mexican War taught officers the superiority of the “tactical offensive”—a tactic that would have devastating consequences in the war to come.
Five hundred and twenty-three West Point graduates fought in the Mexican War, which became a primer for tactics in the Civil War. Under Winfield Scott’s command, veteran officers included Ulysses S. Grant (class of ‘43), William Tecumseh Sherman (’40), Winfield Scott Hancock (‘44), George Thomas (’40), Gordon Meade (’35), Joseph Hooker (’37), John Sedgwick (’37), Joseph E. Johnston (’29), and, most notably, Robert E. Lee (’29). Nearly all were heavily decorated for gallant conduct and imbibed a warrior culture that gloried in the bayonet charge.
The Military Academy’s new superintendent, Pierre Gustave T. Beauregard of Louisiana, would serve only five days: on January 28, he resigned his commission, returned to his home state, and went on from there to Fort Sumter. To Southern cadets, who were pulled between loyalty to country and state, he prescribed caution: “Watch me; when I jump, you jump; what’s the use of jumping too soon?”17 Some South Carolina cadets had, in fact, begun jumping sooner and resigned as early as November 1860: the first was H. S. Farley (’62) from South Carolina. Other resignations followed in December and January, but not yet in significant numbers. On the other side, William Tecumseh Sherman resigned as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy to attach himself to the North.
In raising an army from the ground up, Lincoln depended heavily on West Point. From 1854 to 1861, the Military Academy had adopted a new five-year course of study proposed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and administered by the superintendent, Robert E. Lee. To maximize his officer corps, Lincoln reverted to the old four-year plan and ordered two graduating classes in 1861 with five-year cadets graduating in May and four-year cadets in June. The big question was how many would stay loyal to the Union.
The cadets’ response to Sumter would be critical. If only a few followed Beauregard, the South would be deprived of a vital source of skilled lieutenants and captains who could lead untrained volunteers into the mouth of the cannon. If many departed, Lincoln faced a more daunting challenge.
In making their excruciating decisions, Southern cadets found themselves caught between “honor” and “duty to country.” Where once these two ideals had forged an indomitable bond of brotherhood in devotion to the shrine of one unified country, they now demanded an unprecedented choice. Duty meant, above all, unquestioned obedience to orders. In defending the integrity of the Military Academy as two nations prepared for war, General John Gross Barnard (class of ’33), who would become General George B. McClellan’s chief engineer, highlighted duty:The first duty God requires of man is OBEDIENCE. The first duty the country requires of her people is OBEDIENCE (obedience to her laws). The first virtue of the Soldier is obedience. The first virtue the system of education at the Military Academy inculcates, the first duty she requires is obedience.... The Military Academy has long been recognized ... as the teacher of the purest patriotism, of the most fervent love of country.18
But whose orders would ultimately be honored? They would have to choose whom they would serve. West Point librarian Oliver Otis Howard, who was destined to become one of William Tecumseh Sherman’s greatest generals, recognized that “probably no other place existed where men grappled ... more sensitively ... with the troublesome problems of secession.”19
In late April, after Virginia seceded, Ohio cadet Tully McCrea wrote his belle: “This has been an eventful week in the history of West Point. There has been such a stampede of cadets as was never known before. Thirty-two resigned and were relieved from duty on Monday [April 22] and since then enough to increase the number to more than forty. There are now very few cadets from any southern state here.”20 In fact, seventy-four Southern cadets resigned or were dismissed for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the United States, but twenty-one Southern cadets remained and would eventually follow “duty” and fight for the Union. This was a far higher proportion of loyalists than Southern students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. At Princeton, not one Southern student remained at the college.21
With Southern cadets resigning and returning home, the time for impassioned fistfights had passed. All realized that soon they would be shooting for real, fighting against former brothers and comrades-in-arms. Rather than making shows of bitterness or violence, departing and remaining cadets expressed sorrow and mutual disappointment.
Cadet George Armstrong Custer (’61 June) recalled walking sentinel duty and seeing fifteen defecting Southern cadets marching toward the steamboat landing:Too far off to exchange verbal adieux, even if military discipline had permitted it, they caught sight of me as step by step I reluctantly paid the penalty of offended regulations, and raised their hats in token of farewell, to which, first casting my eyes about to see that no watchful superior was in view, I responded by bringing my musket to a “present.”22
One of the last to leave was the well-liked Fitz Lee from Virginia (not Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee, who graduated from Harvard in 1856). On the eve of his departure Lee’s Northern classmates serenaded him. The next day, as Lee departed, eyes moistened. They were friends after all.
For Tully McCrea, who would graduate in the spring of 1862, the May chapel service was somber. In another letter to his girlfriend he wrote:I have just returned from church where I heard a sermon from Professor French to the graduating class. It was very eloquent and affecting and a great many realized the truths it contained.... There is a certain hymn that is always sung by the choir the last Sunday that the graduates attend church here. It commences “When shall we meet again” and is very appropriate to the occasion. And everyone felt the truth of the concluding words, “Never, no never,” for in all probability in another year the half of them may be in their graves, the victims of war or disease. At any rate they will soon be scattered and will never meet together again as a class.23
Outside of West Point, partisans on both sides were certain their side would win quickly. The cadets knew otherwise. Besides the defections from West Point, Southern officers and West Point graduates were resigning their commissions in distressing numbers and joining the Confederacy. Having already fought one impassioned fistfight, Cadet Emory Upton foresaw the consequences of a West Point at war with itself. In a letter to his sister he predicted a hard war to come:If we have war (mark my words), Jeff Davis will be successful in one or two campaigns. He is energetic, and he is drawing all the talent he can from our army. He will enter the war with his forces well organized, and it can not be denied that Southern men will fight well; hence, what is to prevent his success for a time?24
Upton’s ominous sentiments proved prescient. Little did he realize just how personal they would become for him as he would be wounded in battle three times during the course of the war.
In all, 294 West Point graduates became Union officers and 151 Confederate. Well over half became generals and commanded armies in every major engagement. In fifty-five of the sixty major battles, they commanded both sides. Besides feeding the war machine with aggressive tactics, the West Point generals came to embody the face of American patriotism.
On Friday, April 19, as Federal troops marched south to Washington, riots broke out in Baltimore between Federal soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts and the pro-secessionist citizens of Maryland. As the soldiers moved through the streets, angry
Maryland slaveholders and pro-secessionist citizens rained stones on the soldiers, who returned the action with live fire. At least four soldiers and nine civilians were killed in the exchanges. Hysterical reports of the riots suggested Washington itself might be endangered and have to be evacuated.
In a letter to his fiancée, Therena Bates, written on April 19, John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s chief personal secretary, could not hide his anxiety. As an indication of how frightened the Lincoln administration actually was, Nicolay assured his fiancée: “I do not think any force could be brought against the city to-night, which our men could not easily repel, and therefore do not feel seriously alarmed, although the apprehensions of danger are pretty general.”25
In a letter to the Reverend Alonzo Hill, written on May 1 on House of Representatives stationery, J. Stewart Brown of the Massachusetts volunteers stationed in Washington reported humorously: “We are comfortably quartered in the Senate Chamber, a curious place I think for military to encamp, but at the same time, residents in this city, who have looked in upon us assert that it presents a more peaceable appearance than ever before.” For Brown and his company of volunteers, the overwhelming sentiment was patriotism: “There is but one determination, and that is, to stand by our country, to adore the glorious old stars and stripes, and never to see them dishonored.”26
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