by Bruce Catton
Powhatan was due to sail from New York on April 6. Just before sailing time, Porter appeared, flourished Lincoln’s order, dispossessed Mercer (over the latter’s strong objection), and assumed command of the warship. Mercer got on the wire to the Navy Department, and Welles indignantly hurried to the White House, collecting Seward en route. There were explanations, complaints, and at last an abashed admission by the President that the order to Porter should never have been issued. Welles was told to wire New York, restoring Mercer to Powhatan’s command, and he immediately did so. Porter, however, refused to pay any attention to this order, on the ground that he had been put in command of the warship by the President of the United States and could be relieved by no lesser authority. In the end he sailed Powhatan off for Pensacola in spite of everybody, depriving the Fort Sumter expedition of better than 25 per cent of its naval strength. In the long run this made little difference; what mattered at Charleston was that the shooting began there, and the result would have been the same even if Powhatan had been present.11
Secretary Seward was coming to the end of his period of assumption of authority; the end was not graceful and the aftermath was not good. John A. Campbell and the Confederate commissioners were beginning to suspect that the Secretary had been playing games with them, and on April 7 Campbell sent to Seward a melancholy letter of inquiry. There were increasing rumors, he said, that the government was mounting some sort of expedition for the Confederate seacoast, and although the Justice continued to believe that this could not be aimed at Fort Sumter, he did feel that something ought to be said or done to quiet the rising excitement. He included in his letter a quotation that was more apt than he perhaps realized: “Such government by blind-man’s buff, stumbling along too far, will end by the general over-turn.” Seward immediately sent a reply: “Faith as to Sumter fully kept—wait and see.”
It is hard to be sure just what faith Seward believed that he was talking about. An official messenger had already left for Charleston with a word from the President to Governor Pickens, and Seward knew it; he knew, as well, that Fox would be sailing in forty-eight hours, and that his convoying warships had already left. Deceiving Campbell, he was still deceiving himself, for he appears to have been convinced, even at this late hour, that everything would at last wind up in peace, harmony, and joyful reunion. On the night after he wrote that message for Justice Campbell, Seward chatted with Russell, of the London Times, over the whist table in Seward’s house and assured the correspondent that even the secessionists would presently understand that the administration had no aggressive intent. “When the Southern states see that we mean them no wrong—that we intend no violence to persons, rights, or things,” he told Russell, “they will see their mistake and one after another they will come back into the Union.” This happy turn of events, he said, would take place within three months. A Secretary of State is of course entitled to plant untruths in a great newspaper if that will advance his country’s interests, but in this case it may be that Seward really meant what he was saying. The belief that a huge, untapped reservoir of Unionist sentiment in the South would yet wash away all traces of secession was a long time dying.12
There had been too much loose talk, and the whole administration had been weakened by it. Mr. Stanton wrote to his good friend Buchanan at this time that hardly anyone in the capital had any confidence in the new regime. “A strong feeling of distrust in the candor and sincerity of Lincoln personally, and of his Cabinet has sprung up,” he declared. “If they had been merely silent and secret, there might have been no ground of complaint. But assurances are said to have been given, and declarations made, in conflict with the facts now transpiring in respect to the South, so that no one speaks of Lincoln or any member of his cabinet with respect or regard.”13
It was on April 7 that Justice Campbell was assured that the faith had been fully kept in connection with Fort Sumter. Technically, this was perhaps correct, in a limited sort of way. Campbell’s last promise from the Secretary had been the pledge that the government would not try to provision the fort without first telling the governor of South Carolina; and on April 8 a War Department clerk named Robert S. Chew showed up in Charleston bearing instructions written by President Lincoln which read thus:
“You will proceed directly to Charleston, South Carolina; and if, on your arrival there, the flag of the United States shall be flying over Fort Sumpter, and the Fort shall not have been attacked, you will procure an interview with Gov. Pickens, and read to him as follows: ‘I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition will be made without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.’ ”14
Chew delivered his message that evening. It probably surprised no one except the unhappy commissioners in Washington; the Confederate authorities both in Montgomery and at Charleston had taken very little stock in the fine reports that had been coming down from the North. As early as April 2 Beauregard had been warned by Secretary of War Walker that “the Government has not at any time placed any reliance on assurances by the Government in Washington in respect to the evacuation of Fort Sumter, or entertained any confidence in the disposition of the latter to make any confession or yield any point to which it is not driven by absolute necessity.” Beauregard was instructed that he should be as active and alert “as if you were in the presence of an enemy contemplating to surprise you.”15
Charleston immediately passed Chew’s message along to Montgomery, where President Davis and his cabinet considered it. It was clear that there could be but one answer; possession of Fort Sumter was as much a cardinal point of Davis’s policy as of Lincoln’s. Strangely enough, it was the impetuous, hard-driving Robert Toombs who was reluctant to act. When the telegram was first shown to him he remarked: “The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen; and I do not feel competent to advise you.” The discussion went on for a long time—this was not a matter to be settled on the spur of the moment—and Toombs paced the floor, hands clasped behind him, staring off at nothing. Finally he stopped, faced President Davis, and urged against opening fire.
“Mr. President,” he said, “at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.”16
It would be hard to put, in one paragraph, a better explanation of the tactical insight behind Lincoln’s decision to send Captain Fox down to Charleston harbor.
On April 10 the discussion had been concluded, and if Davis had ever had any serious doubts about what his course should be, he had resolved them. On this morning Secretary Walker sent Beauregard his instructions:
“If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force you will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such manner as you may determine, to reduce it.”17
4: The Circle of Fire
The siege had been carried on in earnest, but it had been like a formalized ritual carried on between friends. The Federal soldiers in the fort and the South Carolina soldiers who encircled it maintained polite relations while they got ready to kill each other, and when the big guns they were lining up went off by accident, or were fired in the wrong direction, letters of apology were quickly sent and gracefully acknowledged.
The guns had been doing a good deal of firing all winter long. Fort Sumter and South Carolina were still at peace, but their gun crews had to be exercised and there was need for target practice. Delegates to the South Carolina convention cruised about in the harbor by steamboat at the end of March, watching the discharge of guns in the different batteries, noting the
way heavy shell could be exploded squarely over the deep-water channel—and, after the firing had ended, enjoying “a very handsome collation” of chicken salad, sandwiches, and cake and wine. Passing Fort Sumter on the way home, the delegates could see Federal officers on the parapet, and believed Anderson himself was surveying them with a telescope.1
Now and then there were accidents. Anderson’s men mounted a ten-inch Columbiad as a mortar in the parade ground, pointing it at Charleston’s fabled park, The Battery; to see if the alignment was correct, they got Major Anderson’s permission to fire one shot with a greatly reduced charge. The reduction in the charge was insufficient; the gun threw its projectile in a soaring parabola that almost landed it in downtown Charleston, and there was a flurry of intense excitement, with officers coming out under flag of truce to ask the major if he was really starting the war. Explanations and an apology followed, and the excitement died down. Similarly, a few days later, some inexpert gun layer in one of Beauregard’s gun crews fired a shot that actually nicked a corner of Fort Sumter itself. Again there were flags of truce, inquiries, and apologies. On April 3, when the tension had appreciably risen, the little schooner Rhoda B. Shannon, carrying ice down from Boston to Savannah, came blundering up the channel toward Charleston harbor and was promptly fired on, one ball splitting her mainsail. Anderson’s drums beat his men to quarters, and at least five of his officers demanded that he open fire on the nearest Confederate battery; Anderson temporized, sent an inquiry ashore under a flag, learned that the schooner’s captain had simply lost his way and that he carried nothing the Sumter garrison wanted in any case, and the incident was closed.2
Once, early in the spring, Mrs. Anderson came down from New York for a visit, bringing with her Peter Hart, who had been a sergeant in Anderson’s company in the Mexican War. Mrs. Anderson felt that with so much disaffection everywhere her husband ought to have one man on whom he could rely implicitly, so she was bringing him this former sergeant. Reaching Charleston, she went to Governor Pickens, who immediately gave her a pass to go to the fort; he did not think he could issue a pass for Sergeant Hart—after all, the man constituted reinforcements, of a sort—but Mrs. Anderson talked him into it, and a Confederate guard boat took her and the former sergeant out to the fort. A Federal sentry cried a challenge as the boat neared the fort, and a Confederate officer took up his speaking trumpet and called: “Mrs. Major Anderson!” Back came the summons: “Mrs. Anderson, advance”—and the major’s wife and the ex-soldier whom he could trust came on to the wharf, and Major Anderson ran out crying “My glorious wife!”
The visit was very brief. There was no talk about home, children, or any other personal matters; Mrs. Anderson simply explained about Sergeant Hart, the sergeant was folded into the Sumter garrison, and Mrs. Anderson got into the guard boat, returned to Charleston, and went back to New York. With the help of the governor of South Carolina and a former sergeant of United States artillery, her mind had been made easier.3
Late in March, Anderson and Beauregard had an odd exchange. It had been printed that the Yankees were going to withdraw the Sumter garrison and that Beauregard had said that he would not permit this unless Anderson first surrendered, and Anderson’s feelings were hurt. He wrote to Beauregard about it in protest, and both Beauregard and Governor Pickens replied politely that nothing of the sort had been said or contemplated. Anderson wrote back that he knew Beauregard could not have said such a thing, and the amenities were properly preserved.4
A Northerner who visited Charleston that winter found that he was greeted without any particular hostility: the people he talked with all asked if the North really intended coercion and closed by saying that everyone in South Carolina hoped for a peaceful separation—peaceful, but of course a separation. He looked on with interest at the drill of the home guard, a modestly uniformed assortment of elderly men, some of them with white hair, and was told that this was a volunteer police force, raised to overawe the Negroes during the absence on military service of most of the city’s young men. One Charlestonian explained that the illiterate Negro slaves, knowing nothing of anything that happened ten miles away from them, had somehow caught on to the fact that big things were stirring in the land.… “Our slaves have heard of Lincoln—that he is a black man, or black Republican, or black something—that he is to become ruler of this country on the fourth of March—that he is a friend of theirs and will help them.” Hence it was essential for the state to establish its independence, so that the black folk would know that this legendary Lincoln could do nothing for them; essential, as well, for the home guard to come out and drill, while the younger men manhandled the big guns out in the marshes.5
So the winter wore away: guns firing harmlessly, officers exchanging dignified notes, elderly home guards drilling under the Carolina sun, Negroes mysteriously hearing something, amateur soldiers toiling to learn the cruel skills of a new profession—and nothing irrevocable was actually happening. But now the pace was quickening, and it would never go any more slowly. Lincoln had made up his mind and sent his message, Secretary Toombs had voiced his grim doubts, Davis had come to his own conclusion and sent a message of his own—and on the night of April 8 the steamer Baltic left her New York wharf, dropped down the bay, and anchored until dawn just inside of Sandy Hook. The warships and tugs had gone on ahead, separately. Baltic would sail in the morning, there would be a rendezvous off the Charleston bar, and it was conceivable that the Sumter garrison would get fresh provisions.
Gustavus Fox, aboard Baltic, had few doubts about his mission, several doubts about Major Anderson. When he visited Fort Sumter, he had supposed that he would find a straightforward soldier, thinking only of his soldierly duty and hoping his government would send him help in time. To such a man Fox would have told everything he knew—about the projected relief expedition, about the eddying cross-currents in Washington, about Lincoln himself. But he felt that he had found a man who was “on the other side, politically as well as in a military point of view”; as a Massachusetts-born Unionist, Fox could neither understand nor sympathize with the American of conflicting loyalties.6
Anderson, whose loyalty to the Federal government never wavered for a moment, had doubts of his own. He doubted that the relief expedition would work, and he wrote to the War Department: “I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned.” He felt that Washington should have told him about it earlier; Fox had done no more than hint at it, and Lamon had convinced him that the thing would not be tried. “We shall strive to do our duty,” said the major, “though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is thus to be commenced.”7
One man who had no doubts was Beauregard. He was a soldier whose loyalty lay with his duty. He had come to Charleston to form what he called “a circle of fire” around Fort Sumter; the circle was formed, and he would set it aflame whenever he was told to do so, content to follow the destiny of his state. To a Northern friend he wrote that his state had called on him for his services; he had given them, “not through a false ambition or a desire to see my name (badly spelt) in print, but because I consider it my solemn duty.” He hoped sooner or later to be able to retire to a farm near New Orleans, with his family, his books, and a few friends around him. Meanwhile, “whether this revolution results in peace or war—I will take as my only guide a clear conscience and a fearless heart.”8 Now he had his orders from Secretary Walker, and he would carry them out.
Another man untroubled by doubts was Roger Pryor, the Virginia Congressman, who came down to Charleston, was serenaded on the evening of April 10, and spoke with unrestrained passion to the serenaders who stood in the street in the spring dusk under his hotel balcony.
“Gentlemen, I thank you, especially that you have at last annihilated this cursed Union, reeking with corruption and insolent with excess of tyranny,” cried Pryor. “Thank God, it is at last blasted and riven by the lightning wrath of an outraged and indignant people. Not only is it gone, but gone fore
ver.” South Carolina had taken the lead, but Virginia would surely follow. A great storm of cheers arose when Pryor shouted his words of advice: “I will tell you, gentlemen, what will put her in the Southern Confederation in less than an hour by Shrewsbury clock—strike a blow! The very moment that blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South.”
The news that Sumter was to be reinforced was out, and words like Pryor’s were what Charleston wanted to hear. At midnight alarm guns were fired from Citadel Square, signal for the reserves to assemble, and all night long there were the beating of drums and the tramping of feet as company after company formed up—in the open streets, armories being lacking—and moved off to their posts. It was reported that a United States fleet lay off the bar, in the windy dark, and signal lights were seen, or were believed to have been seen, atop Fort Sumter.9
On the morning of April 11—cloudy, with a mild breeze, although a heavy swell out at sea kept Captain Fox’s steamer tossing most uncomfortably on its way down from New York—Beauregard set about the composition of the formal demand for Fort Sumter’s surrender. He had it finished by noon, and soon after that a boat with a white flag shoved off from a Charleston wharf and headed for the fort. It carried two of Beauregard’s aides—Colonel James Chesnut, until December a United States Senator from South Carolina, an aristocrat of aristocrats, whose wife was keeping a diary that would be famous; and Captain Stephen D. Lee, a West Point graduate recently resigned from the United States Army, a man who would win fame and high position as a Confederate officer. With them was Lieutenant Colonel James A. Chisholm, aide-decamp to Governor Pickens. In due course the boat reached the fort. The officers came on the wharf and were taken inside, and to Major Anderson they gave General Beauregard’s message.
