Coming Fury, Volume 1

by Bruce Catton

  On January 12 the Florida authorities first demanded the surrender of the fort. Slemmer had rejected this demand, but it was common knowledge that an attack was being planned, and in consequence it was much to Slemmer’s advantage when Florida’s Stephen R. Mallory—a United States Senator, in January: in March, Jefferson Davis’s Secretary of the Navy—worked out a deal with President Buchanan. Under this deal the North would not reinforce Pickens and the South would not attack it. Both sides were fortifying, but neither side did any shooting. In many ways the case of Pickens and Pensacola was like the case of Sumter and Charleston, except that nobody worked up a great head of steam about it. Potentially, the cases were exactly parallel, with the Federal government occupying a fort in a seaport that (as secessionists saw it, at any rate) belonged to a foreign power. One fort would make just as good a test case as the other. So far Fort Sumter had drawn all of the emotion, but there was plenty to spare for Fort Pickens if anyone made an issue of it.

  At the end of the first week in March the Fort Pickens situation was endurable but complicated, the chief complication being that no one in Washington was entirely clear about the deal Buchanan had made back in January. The Navy Department of course knew that U.S.S. Brooklyn, swinging to her anchor chain half a mile from the Fort Pickens sally port, still contained a company of soldiers who belonged in the fort but had not been put there because the administration, two months earlier, had felt that it was advisable to keep them afloat for a while yet. In an absent-minded sort of way the department probably realized that the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Sabine, Captain H. A. Adams, who also commanded the squadron, had been instructed on January 30 not to put the soldiers ashore “unless said fort shall be attacked or preparations shall be made for its attack.” But nobody in Washington quite realized (and this was typical of the confusion and general fogginess which lay upon the capital as the new administration took over) that as far as Captain Adams knew, these orders of January 30 were still binding unless the Navy Department specifically canceled them.3

  Since January the situation at Pensacola had changed. The Confederacy had taken over. The thousands of Southern troops at Pensacola were now under the command of Brigadier General Braxton Bragg, a dour martinet who was an exceedingly capable trainer and organizer of troops but who, in action, was to show a bewildering knack for following moments of genuine achievement with moments of inexplicable incompetence; a baffling character, who would retain Davis’s confidence long after he had lost that of practically everyone else in the South. Like Beauregard, Bragg had been busy, and he had many guns in position along the water front. He was darkly pessimistic, writing to his wife that “our troops are raw volunteers, without officers, and without discipline, each man with an idea that he can whip the world,” and he did not see how the fort could be taken without a regular siege. But he was whipping his men into shape, and by mid-March the only thing around Pensacola that had not changed was the January 30 order in Captain Adams’s desk.4

  However that might be, Fort Pickens had a powerful claim on the new President’s attention. Lincoln apparently was about to lose so much more than he could afford to lose at Fort Sumter; at Fort Pickens, quite possibly, he could get all of it back.

  The Fort Sumter problem had always been loaded. If the Lincoln administration gave up the fort without a fight, the Confederacy was virtually independent; no one thereafter—in the North, in the South, or anywhere else—would see much reason to think that this government would or could maintain the Union. On the other hand, if the administration mobilized army and navy and fought its way into Charleston harbor, it immediately became the aggressor, validating all of the anguished complaints about coercion of the South; and it would certainly lose the border states en bloc. Its only possible course was the one that had been set forth in the inaugural—to stay in Fort Sumter peaceably, leaving only after the other side had brought on a fight. And this only possible course was, according to Major Anderson’s dispatch, about to be lost.

  But Fort Pickens was different. This fort could be reinforced to the limit of capacity, without the need for firing a shot. Furthermore, the reinforcements—or enough of them, at any rate, to show what the policy was going to be—were immediately available and could be put into the fort in short order. The test of the administration’s determination to “hold, occupy and possess” its remaining forts could be made at Fort Pickens just about as well as at Fort Sumter. If the place were immediately reinforced, the government’s will would be unmistakable. The Fort Sumter problem could be disposed of at leisure. If Captain Fox’s plans looked good, Major Anderson could be reinforced and supplied; if not, Major Anderson could be withdrawn and no great harm would have been done.

  Accordingly, on March 12, U.S.S. Mohawk was sent off to make a quick run to Pensacola. It bore a dispatch from General Scott, signed by E. D. Townsend, assistant adjutant general of the army, addressed to Captain Israel Vogdes, captain of the company of regulars which had been resting aboard U.S.S. Brooklyn for so many weeks, and the dispatch read as follows:

  “At the first favorable moment you will land with your company, re-enforce Fort Pickens, and hold the same till further orders. Report frequently, if opportunities present themselves, on the condition of the fort and the circumstances around you.”

  On the same day, General Scott wrote that “as a practical military question the time for succoring Fort Sumter with any means at hand had passed away nearly a month ago.” In the general’s opinion it would take four months to collect the needed warships, and from six to eight months to raise and discipline the troops—5000 regulars and 20,000 volunteers. The fort’s surrender, from starvation or under assault, was, he felt, merely a question of time. On this day, too, Fox’s detailed plan was brought before the President, who liked it and found that most of the cabinet also liked it; and on March 15 Lincoln sent to each cabinet member a note:

  “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it? Please give me your opinion in writing on this subject.”5

  The assumption that it was possible to put provisions into the fort doubtless owed much to Fox, who seemed to be the only optimist in town. With the new administration less than a fortnight old, most of Washington was already taking it for granted that Fort Sumter would be given up. For two days, newspaper correspondents had been telling their papers that the cabinet had agreed to evacuate the fort. The Baltimore American’s story was explicit: “The battle of the cabinet has been fought and Mr. Seward has triumphed. The cabinet has ordered the withdrawal of Major Anderson from Fort Sumter.” Edwin M. Stanton, who had lent so much vigor to the closing weeks of Buchanan’s administration, wrote to Buchanan that Lincoln had not yet come to any decision on the matter—Seward, Bates, and Cameron, he said, were pulling him one way, and Chase, Welles, and Blair were pulling in the opposite direction—but he felt that what was coming was clear enough: “It is certain that Anderson will be withdrawn.” Rumors of surrender were printed in Charleston, and were believed inside Fort Sumter; hospital supplies and other movables were packed, by way of preparation for the move. Some of Anderson’s people thought that they could see the besieging Confederates beginning to relax—obviously because they expected to get Fort Sumter without further effort. (The relaxation was only temporary, if indeed it existed at all. Beauregard was profoundly skeptical about Yankee intentions.)6

  The Washington correspondent who spoke of the anticipated withdrawal as a victory for Seward had put his finger on one of the real oddities of the situation. Seward, who had tried at the last minute to avoid entering the cabinet at all, was doing his best to run things now that he was in it. The papers had a way of referring to him as “Lincoln’s Premier,” and it was widely believed—by Seward himself, most of all—that Seward would be the real boss of the administration. And Seward, who had won Southern hatred years earlier by talking glibly of an irrepressible conflict, believed now that everything could be settle
d if the government let go of Fort Sumter in the right way. The stories that Anderson would be withdrawn were almost certainly being planted by Seward. At the very time when Lincoln was asking the ministers to say whether or not Fort Sumter should be provisioned, Seward was quietly passing the word to the Confederate commissioners that the fort was going to be surrendered. Captain Fox was not going to get any support from the Secretary of State; neither, for that matter, was Major Anderson … nor the dedicated Union men of the North, who had put this administration in office in the first place, who in the Northwest had seen secession as no better than rebellion and treason, and who if a fight at last came would be the men on whom the government would have to rely the most. Ben Wade, the ruthless anti-slavery extremist from Ohio, was furiously declaring that withdrawal would wreck the Republican party and the administration throughout the Northwest, and he was said to have told Lincoln bluntly: “Give up fortress after fortress and Jeff Davis will have you a prisoner of war in less than thirty days.” In New England many Republicans felt the way prominent editor Joseph Hawley, of Connecticut, felt. Hawley had just written to Gideon Welles that he could see why Fort Sumter must be given up, but that the idea brought tears to his eyes, and he had then burst out: “I will gladly be one of the volunteers to sail into that harbor past all the guns of hell rather than see the flag dishonored and the government demoralized.”7 A tension was rising in the North, and the longer the business of the forts hung in the balance, the higher it would be, matching the merciless tension that already was tormenting the South.

  Lincoln’s cabinet did not think Sumter ought to be relieved. Of all the members, only Montgomery Blair was flatly and without qualifications in favor of sending provisions down to Major Anderson. Secretary Chase, to be sure, was for it, with encircling ifs and buts; he admitted later that just now he favored letting the seven seceded states “try the experiment of a separate existence rather than incur the evils of a bloody war,” and his endorsement of the relief plan was trimmed down until it was actually no endorsement at all. Even Gideon Welles believed that the administration had best let well enough alone. “An impression has gone abroad,” he wrote, “that Sumter is to be evacuated and the shock caused by that announcement has done its work. The public mind is becoming tranquillized under it, and will become fully reconciled to it when the causes which have led to that necessity shall have been made public and are rightly understood.” Secretary of War Simon Cameron recited the heavy weight of professional opinion which held that the only thing to do with Major Anderson was to call him home, and wrote that since “the abandonment of the fort in a few weeks, sooner or later, appears to be an inevitable necessity, it seems to me that the sooner it be done the better.” He went on to say that he liked Captain Fox’s plan and would support it except that he believed it would bring on a war.8

  In effect, all of the cabinet except Blair opposed the plan to send relief to Major Anderson, and Lincoln—still painfully new in the office, and surrounded by advisers most of whom believed that they on the whole were wiser and more experienced than himself—did not feel that he could go ahead in face of all that opposition. He was not, however, ready to give up. If his election and his own convictions meant anything at all, he had to make a stand somewhere. For the moment he would postpone a final decision. Meanwhile, he needed to know everything he could know about the exact situation, both in Fort Sumter and in Charleston itself.

  As a first step, the President seems to have called on Mrs. Abner Doubleday, who was then living in Washington, to see what light the letters she was getting from her husband might shed. Of all of Major Anderson’s officers, Doubleday was probably the most wholehearted in his belief that the fort ought to be held in spite of everything, but his letters could tell the President little except the condition of the garrison and the state of its preparations for defense.9 Lincoln needed something broader than this, and he sent down three men to get the information he needed.

  The first of these was Captain Fox himself. Lincoln talked to him on March 19, and two days later Fox reached Charleston. He went to see Governor Pickens, explained his mission, and said that he would like to talk to Major Anderson—not to give him any orders, but simply to find out what his situation really was. Governor Pickens agreed, and shortly after dusk a Confederate guard steamer dropped Fox on the wharf at Fort Sumter.

  Anderson was pessimistic. He thought it was too late for the government to relieve him except by landing troops on Morris Island and storming the batteries there—an operation which, as General Scott had pointed out, would take a large army and a powerful fleet—and he made it clear that his supplies were getting very low. He and Fox agreed that Fox must tell the President that the troops could not stay in the fort after April 15 unless more supplies were received. While the men talked, the splashing of a rowboat’s oars could be heard somewhere off in the darkness, although no boat could be seen. Fox drew the major’s attention to this, indicating that small boats might reach the fort at night without damage, but Anderson felt that this was not good enough—Fort Moultrie had at least thirteen guns bearing on the wharf where the boats would have to unload, and he did not think the chances were very bright. Fox insisted that he did not actually tell Anderson about his plan, although Anderson apparently got a fairly clear idea of what was in the wind. (A little later the Confederates accused Fox of acting in bad faith, since he had assured Governor Pickens he was not bringing Anderson any orders. Fox insisted that he had lived up to the agreement, but said that it did not matter: he considered that a state of war already existed, and felt that it was entirely legitimate for him to deceive “the enemy” in any way he could.) In any case, Fox presently returned to Washington and prepared to tell Lincoln what he had learned.10

  A second emissary was Stephen A. Hurlbut, an Illinois lawyer and Republican leader whom Lincoln had known for years. Hurlbut reached Charleston March 24, shortly after Fox started back to Washington, concerned less with finding out about Major Anderson’s position than with ascertaining just how the people of Charleston felt about everything. He talked to old James L. Petigru, who by now was recognized as the only Union man in the state, talked also with businessmen and politicians whom he knew, and returned full of unrelieved gloom. He found in Charleston no vestige of attachment to the Union, and told Lincoln bluntly that “there is positively nothing to appeal to—the sentiment of national patriotism, always feeble in Carolina, has been extinguished and over-ridden.” Nothing the government could do short of unqualified recognition of South Carolina’s independence and complete surrender of Federal jurisdiction, he felt, would satisfy Charleston, and Beauregard would unquestionably stop even a boat containing nothing but bacon and hardtack. As far as Hurlbut could see, the case of Fort Sumter was hopeless; the only thing Lincoln could do was hold on to Fort Pickens—and “if war comes, let it come.”11

  The third man Lincoln sent to Charleston was Ward Lamon, a close personal friend, newly appointed Federal marshal for the District of Columbia. Lamon and Hurlbut went south together, but parted once they reached Charleston. Lamon learned nothing Lincoln did not already know, but he did manage to muddy the waters slightly. He talked to Governor Pickens and to Major Anderson, and gave both men the definite feeling that troops at Fort Sumter were going to be withdrawn. Sympathetic to the South, Lamon almost certainly exceeded his authority; writing about it long afterward, he was notably reserved regarding the messages he had been supposed to give the governor and the major—if indeed he had been supposed to do anything more than take soundings—but he was looked upon in Charleston as the President’s authorized agent, and Anderson reported to the War Department that what Lamon told him led him to believe “that orders would soon be issued for my abandoning this work.” Whatever Lamon may have said, he at least brought back to Washington Governor Pickens’s flat warning that “nothing can prevent war except the acquiescence of the President of the United States in secession and his unalterable resolve not to attempt any reinforcem
ent of the Southern forts.” In substance, his report to the President was about like Hurlbut’s: even the arrival of a boatload of provisions would touch off a fight.12

  The three men returned to Washington separately, and Lincoln called a new cabinet meeting to consider the situation. Meanwhile, there were two additional complications. General Scott submitted a memorandum advising against the plan to reinforce and hold Fort Pickens; and Captain H. A. Adams, the senior naval officer at Pensacola, saw the orders the U.S.S. Mohawk had brought down and refused to honor them. Captain Adams pointed out that he was still bound by the January 30 orders from the Secretary of the Navy, which said he was not to put troops ashore unless the fort were under attack or clearly about to be attacked. What the War Department might write to Captain Vogdes was interesting, but it did not affect him. He would stand by the old orders, and he and the soldiers would remain aboard ship. In some anxiety, Captain Adams wrote to the Navy Department: “I beg you will please send me instructions as soon as possible, that I may be relieved from a painful embarrassment.”

  For the moment, nobody in Washington knew about this. When the news did come, Secretary Welles wrote bitterly that Adams was technically justified, although Welles felt that “a faithful and patriotic officer would have been justified in taking a reasonable responsibility.” Meanwhile, President and cabinet would reconsider the Fort Sumter problem.13