Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Only one of the Charleston forts, Fort Moultrie, was seriously occupied by the two artillery companies that constituted Charleston’s federal garrison. Of the other two, Castle Pinckney was an obsolete relic of the eighteenth century, and Fort Sumter was an incomplete brick pentagon sitting on a man-made island of granite rubble beside the main ship channel. Under pressure from the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan probably would have been willing to negotiate with South Carolina over the future of the forts; presumably to pave the way for those negotiations, the secretary of war, a pro-secession Virginian named John B. Floyd, sent the Charleston garrison a slaveholding Kentucky major of artillery, Robert Anderson, as its new commander in November 1860. Anderson’s orders were to avoid provocations, carry out military business as usual, and make no changes in his dispositions unless he felt his garrison was actually threatened in some way. That, and a little time, would ensure that the Charleston forts could be turned over, either to Lincoln so that Buchanan could retire in peace, or to the South Carolinians without a messy confrontation.

  Anderson was a Southerner, but he was also a career regular army officer whose first loyalty was to the honor of the United States. Anderson first surveyed the decaying ramparts of Fort Moultrie, then sized up the growing numbers of armed South Carolina militia keeping watch over Fort Moultrie. Six days after South Carolina uproariously adopted its secession ordinance, Anderson exercised the discretion granted him by his orders and changed his dispositions. Under cover of night, he evacuated his two companies from Moultrie and rowed them over to Sumter, where no one in Charleston had a hope of laying hands on them. The next morning Anderson raised his flag “to the top of the staff, the band broke out with the national air of ‘Hail Columbia,’ and loud and exultant cheers, repeated again and again, were given by the officers, soldiers, and workmen.”84

  An “outrageous breach of faith” was how the Charleston Mercury characterized Anderson’s move. The North, by contrast, hailed Anderson as a hero, a patriot who at last had the courage to defy the secession bluster. President Buchanan was angered by Anderson’s move and was inclined to order Anderson back to Moultrie. But when it appeared that Northern public opinion was solidly behind Anderson, Buchanan changed his mind and attempted to persuade the South Carolinians to accept Anderson’s occupation of Fort Sumter as a legitimate exercise of federal authority. The South Carolina government, however, stopped its ears. Nothing now would satisfy their injured pride but the unconditional surrender of Sumter, and on January 9, 1861, when the steamer Star of the West (“a mere transport, utterly unfitted to contend with shore batteries”) entered Charleston harbor with provisions and reinforcements for Sumter, South Carolina militia opened fire on it with several cannon and forced the ship to withdraw. Only Anderson’s restraint in refusing to open fire himself on the South Carolinians kept civil war from breaking out at that moment.85 From that time onward, Anderson took nothing further for granted. His eighty-five-man force of soldiers, bandsmen, and civilian workers mounted a total of sixty powerful cannon inside the fort, and he brought the uncompleted fort as close to war readiness as possible.

  Anderson’s refusal to take the firing on the Star of the West as a signal for him to bombard the city of Charleston also made it possible for Buchanan to escape from office without further incident. Lincoln formally assumed office from Buchanan on March 4, 1861, and in his inaugural address he made it as clear as he could that he had no intention of backing down in his support of Major Anderson. However, as Anderson himself informed Lincoln in a dispatch received on the evening of the inaugural, the real question was not whether the government would support Anderson but whether Anderson could support himself. When the new Confederate States government had officially taken over control of the Charleston harbor defenses on March 1, it had immediately cut Sumter off from all mail and local food supplies and begun erecting ominous batteries of cannon around the harbor perimeter. In his dispatch, Anderson warned the new president that he had only enough food for six weeks more in the fort, and at the end of that time he would be compelled to surrender.86 What did Lincoln propose to do?

  For three weeks Lincoln weighed the alternatives before him. On one hand, he could attempt to resupply Sumter, but with the example of the Star of the West before him, he knew that any such attempt would provoke a shooting match, which he would be held responsible for starting—contrary to all of his assurances to the slave states over the past three months, and in full confirmation of all the wild accusations about his aggressive designs on the South. That, in turn, could easily cause not only a full-fledged civil war but also a fresh round of secessions, this time in the upper South. On the other hand, Lincoln could order Sumter evacuated; in that event, he knew, the credibility of his presidency and the Republican administration would be in pieces before either had scarcely begun.

  On March 29, after polling his cabinet for the second time on the question, Lincoln decided. He ordered a supply flotilla prepared and sent to Charleston, then sat back to await the unpleasant outcome. If the flotilla succeeded in resupplying Sumter, then federal authority in South Carolina had been preserved, and Charleston could do little short of war to change it; if it failed, the failure would be due to Charleston’s decision to open fire, and the onus of beginning a civil war would lie on their heads. Clearly, Lincoln was not trying to provoke war; but it was also true that either way, Charleston lost and Lincoln won, and years afterward people would become convinced that Lincoln had rigged it all deliberately to have a civil war begin that way.87

  As it turned out, the Confederates did not wait for the flotilla to arrive. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate cabinet in Montgomery were notified of Lincoln’s resupply mission on April 10, and the next day they ordered the Confederate commander in Charleston—a dashing French Louisianan named Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—to demand Anderson’s surrender, or else proceed to level the fort.88 Anderson rejected Beauregard’s demand, and at 4:30 am on April 12, 1861, the Confederate batteries ringing Charleston harbor opened fire on Anderson’s pitiful little garrison. For thirty-four hours Anderson’s two companies fought back until their ammunition was exhausted and the interior of the fort was hopelessly ablaze. On April 14 Anderson lowered his flag, and marched out of the battered fort, remarkably without having lost a single man of his garrison during the bombardment.

  That night, the observatory at Harvard College noted the advent of an enormous comet. In the estimate of the venerable British astronomer Sir John Herschel, it “exceeded in brilliancy all other comets that he had ever seen,” and until it passed its perihelion and faded from view in December, it was “the most brilliant that has appeared for centuries, and one of the most remarkable on record.” Of course, cautioned a writer for the Danville Quarterly Review, people no longer regarded comets “as omens of impending evil, or messengers of an angry Deity.” Looking back from the vantage point of the next four years, the Review might not have felt so confident.89

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TO WAR UPON SLAVERY

  THE EAST AND EMANCIPATION, 1861–1862

  On the “most exquisite morning” of April 15, 1861, Sarah Butler Wister rose early to take a bundle of letters to the post office near her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown. To her annoyance, she found that their newspaper had been stolen from their doorstep. But soon she and her husband, Dr. Owen Jones Wister, found that they needed no newspapers to learn what was happening in the world. “All the world was awake & alive with the news that Ft. Sumter has surrendered,” she confided to her diary.1

  The news of the fall of Fort Sumter set off a string of contradictory emotions in Sarah Butler Wister. Her father was Pierce Butler, a Georgia planter and Democratic politician, and the mail that morning contained a letter from her father describing a guided tour he had received of the Charleston harbor batteries by “Gen. Beauregard & other officers.” Her mother, however, was the celebrated English Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble, who had married Pier
ce Butler in 1834 and lived to regret it. The life Kemble led on the Butler plantation was miserable beyond description, and the lot of the Butler family slaves was even more miserable. Divorcing Butler, Kemble returned to England and the stage in 1845, and would later publish a Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, which painted slavery in its vilest colors. Sarah Butler had been born in 1835 in Philadelphia (Pierce Butler had inherited land in both Philadelphia and Georgia from the two very different sides of his family) and married Owen Jones Wister there in 1859. Her opinions on slavery flowed all in her mother’s direction.

  Both the weather and the news turned darker through the day. While “the latter part of the day was gloomy and forbidding,” she heard rumors of “thousands… furious at the news of the surrender,” marching in the streets of Philadelphia “& swearing revenge on all disunionists or disaffected.” Robert Tyler, the son of former president John Tyler, “literally fled before them,” and the crowd “visited the houses, stores & offices of” Southerners who had made themselves “especially odious in the last few days.” The mob was in the streets again the next day (“oh how thankful I am for Father’s absence”) and had to be pacified by speeches and threats from Mayor Alexander Henry. Not that Sarah Wister really minded them: “They were the most moderate, mannerly mob ever heard of.” At the same time, though, she saw in their faces (when she went out to buy “radishes in the market”) that “they were in the utmost state of excitement & the least thing would have fired them, & then riots must have followed.” Mixed snow and rain fell the next day, but “flags large & small flaunt from every building, the dry-goods shops have red, white & blue materials draped together in their windows, in the ribbon stores the national colors hang in long streamers, and even the book sellers place the red, white, and blue bindings together.”

  On the day following, their newspaper was “stolen from the door step again.”

  Fifteen miles away, in rural Chester County, the news of the fall of Fort Sumter came over the telegraph wire to West Chester, the county seat, on Sunday evening, April 14. The next morning, the national flag was flying everywhere through the town. Across Chester County, in Upper Uwchlan Township, an immense Stars and Stripes was hoisted up an eighty-foot pole in front of the local tavern, and in the evening the county courthouse was thrown open for a mass Union rally.2 Far to the north, at Maine’s Bowdoin College, a professor and former pupil of Calvin Stowe who had once sat in the Stowe parlor listening to Harriet Beecher Stowe read drafts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was seized with anger that “the flag of the Nation had been insulted” and “the integrity and the existence of the People of the United States had been assailed in open and bitter war.” His name was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and an “irresistible impulse” came over him to abandon the teaching of rhetoric at Bowdoin and join the army to become God’s minister “in a higher sense than the word.”3

  To the west, the news of the first shot fell on the Ohio legislature when “a senator came in from the lobby in an excited way” and cried out, “‘The telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!’” There was a sick moment of silence, and then “a woman’s shrill voice” called out from the gallery, “Glory to God!” It was the voice of Abby Kelley, the veteran abolitionist for whose sake William Lloyd Garrison had broken up the American Anti-Slavery Society two decades before. Kelley had come to believe, with John Brown, that “only through blood” could the freedom of the slaves be won, and now the redeeming blood of the abolition martyrs could begin to flow. The next day, the news of Anderson’s surrender came over the wires, and “the flag—The Flag—flew out to the wind from every housetop in our great cities.” Ohio judge Thomas Key stopped State Senator Jacob Dolson Cox in the Ohio Senate hall: “Mr. Cox, the people have gone stark mad!” Cox, a staunch anti-slavery Whig turned Republican, replied, “I knew they would if a blow were struck against the flag.”4

  Six hundred miles to the South, the English newspaperman and war correspondent William Howard Russell had gone to church on Sunday morning, April 14, in a small Episcopal parish in Norfolk, Virginia. “The clergyman or minister had got to the Psalms” when a man slipped into the back of the church and began whispering excitedly to the first people he could speak to. The whispering rose in volume, while some of the people at the back “were stealing on tiptoe out of the church.” The minister doggedly plunged on through the liturgy, and the people gradually began to heave themselves up and walk out, until at length Russell “followed the example” and left the minister to finish the service on his own. Outside in the street, Russell found a crowd running through the street. “Come along, the telegraph’s in at the Day Book. The Yankees are whipped!” Russell was told. “At all the street corners men were discussing the news with every symptom of joy and gratification.” That night, in Richmond, “bonfires and fireworks of every description were illuminating in every direction—the whole city was a scene of joy owing to [the] surrender of Fort Sumter”—and Virginia wasn’t even then part of the Confederacy.5

  Further south, in what was now the Confederate States of America, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, received a telegram from P. G. T. Beauregard at 2:00 PM on April 13, informing Davis, “Quarters in Sumter all burned down. White flag up. Have sent a boat to receive surrender.” Davis wired back his congratulations, and added, “If occasion offers, tender my friendly remembrance to Major Anderson.”6 He went to bed, gloomy with the foreboding that Lincoln and the North would soon retaliate. Davis had never been able to make his fellow Southerners understand that secession would mean war with the Northern states, and a long war at that. “You overrate the risk of war,” the governor of Mississippi had assured Davis. “I only wish I did,” Davis replied.

  Outside, in the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, the crowds cheered and cheered.7

  WAR OF THE THOUSAND-COLORED UNIFORMS

  The bombardment and seizure of Fort Sumter was an act of aggression that no one, least of all President Lincoln, could afford to ignore. What the Confederate forces had done in Charleston harbor was, technically speaking, nothing different from John Brown’s assault on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, a deliberate and hostile act of war, with the added flavor of treason. It destroyed at one stroke all real hope for negotiation or compromise and left it up to Lincoln to demonstrate whether or not the federal government was prepared to back up its denial of the right to secession with force. Long ago, in 1856, Lincoln had warned the Democrats that a Republican administration would not allow the Union to be dissolved, and “if you attempt it, we won’t let you.” At the same time he dismissed all serious talk of secession as “humbug—nothing but folly.”8 Now the talk had to be turned into iron reality.

  But what means did Lincoln have at his disposal to suppress the Confederate rebellion? The United States Army consisted of only ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, and five of cavalry (including dragoons and mounted riflemen)—in all, that worked out to 1,105 commissioned officers, a number of whom were Southerners from the seceded states, and 15,259 enlisted men.9 Furthermore, few of the regiments were together in one place, almost all of them having been broken up piecemeal to garrison forts in the West or along the borders. It was, in truth, little more than a police force. There was no general staff to coordinate the army’s various functions—recruitment, planning, training, mapmaking. The cavalry contained no heavy cavalry units, only light cavalry useful for skirmishing and scouting. Three-quarters of the army’s artillery had been scrapped at the close of the Mexican War, and artillery units had been “made to serve either as infantry or cavalry, thus destroying almost completely their efficiency as artillery.” No force of such tiny proportions was likely to bring the secessionists easily to heel.

  What was worse, Congress was at that moment out of session, and without congressional sanction, Lincoln lacked constitutional authority to raise a national army. Nor could Congress be assembled at the drop of a hat for the emergency. Unlike the Senate, the representa
tives in the House were still elected in 1860 on a staggered schedule that varied from state to state, and the new Congress did not usually expect to fully assemble itself after an election year until December of the following year—which, in this case, meant December 1861. At the very best, even with speeding up some state elections, there was little hope of getting the new Congress together before July, when a number of crucial border-state elections would finally be complete. Maryland, in fact, would not hold its congressional elections until June 13, and Kentucky not until a week after that.10

  Lincoln did have one other recourse for recruiting soldiers, and that was the 1795 federal militia statute that had originally delegated to President Washington the authority to call up the militia of the various states in the event of insurrection. So on April 15, two days after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln issued a proclamation that declared the Confederate states in rebellion and called for the states of the Union to provide the federal government with 75,000 militia for three months (the statutory maximum), with the numbers to be apportioned among the states. Two weeks later, he issued a second call, this time for the recruitment of forty regiments of state volunteers (a little over 42,000 men) and the expansion of the regular army by eight regiments of infantry and one each of artillery and cavalry. Although Congress approved both acts retroactively—in fact, greatly expanded the numbers of volunteer recruitments, up to a million men—nothing in the 1795 statute had authorized either of these follow-up calls, and Lincoln would later have to justify his actions largely on the admittedly vague basis of the “war power of the government.”11