The most marked change to be observed on that dispiriting morning was in the major himself. The officers were not privy to his official correspondence with Washington, but for days they had noticed Anderson’s usual stoicism sinking into depression. He seemed even grayer and more melancholy than ever, as if oppressed by some new and secret care.
The following day brought a sudden change in the weather, a strange new portent—and an explanation. The ninth of April dawned fine and clear. Against the rooftops of the city, three miles distant, a fresh skyline seemed to blossom as hundreds of sails unfurled along Charleston’s wharves. Not long afterward, the men at Sumter watched the departing armada pass them: more than forty merchant ships running free before the northwest breeze toward open water, their sails like so many white petals, each curled edge sharp against the blue. Charleston Harbor was left almost empty. “It was a beautiful sight I assure you,” wrote Crawford in his last letter to his brother, a letter that would never be delivered.38
It was not many hours after this that Anderson gathered his officers and shared his private burden of almost two full days. He had received the long-awaited orders from Washington, in the form of a terse six-sentence communiqué from Simon Cameron, the new secretary of war. A relief expedition was already on its way with provisions and reinforcements. The garrison was to hold out, if at all possible, until its arrival. And Cameron conveyed a message from Lincoln himself: “It is not, however, the intention of the President to subject your command to any danger or hardship beyond what, in your judgment, would be usual in military life; and he has entire confidence that you will act as becomes a patriot and soldier, under all circumstances.”39
At long last, the Kentuckian in the White House had made his wishes known to the Kentuckian in Fort Sumter. What unfolded in the coming days would depend, more than anything else, on these two men.
AS ANDERSON’S MEN were counting their crumbs one night during the last week of March, President and Mrs. Lincoln were hosting their first official dinner at the White House. Anxious about Washington protocol, they had sought the discreet coaching of Secretary Seward and his able staff—and by all accounts this initial Republican foray into formal entertaining was competent enough, if not exactly splendid. The gaslight and candles had been artfully arranged to conceal the State Dining Room’s shabbiness, and the air was perfumed by fresh spring blossoms in gilt-silver vases, a refreshing change from the artificial flowers preferred by the previous administration. Mrs. Lincoln appeared, arrayed in garish silk, her plump hand clutching a fan that she fluttered energetically—coquettishly, she seemed to think. William Howard Russell, the acerbic correspondent for the London Times, peered at her through his wire-rimmed spectacles, taking mental notes on every detail of this frontier queen’s curious mannerisms. (They were, he would tell his readers, “stiffened … by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer.”)
With the exception of Russell, the guest list was, as might have been expected, an unadventurous one: the entire cabinet was in attendance, seated stiffly in their drab frock coats like a conclave of Methodist parsons, their ranks enlivened only by twenty-one-year-old Kate Chase, the treasury secretary’s captivating daughter. The menu, too, was conservative: imported wines accompanied fish prepared à la française. In the end, it was the president himself who set his guests at ease, resting his bony elbows on the table and treating everyone to a comical yarn about a drunken Irish coachman he’d met in his days as a young lawyer riding the circuit.40
Only one of the administration’s senior counselors was conspicuously absent: General Scott, the hero of 1812 and 1848, and typically a fixture at such occasions, his monumental bulk, gold-braided and brass-buttoned, making an impressive centerpiece at any Washington function. (Nor had Scott, whose appetite for good food and fine wine was almost as legendary as his martial exploits, ever been known to decline a dinner invitation.) The other guests awaited his appearance at table for some time—several of them had glimpsed him in the reception room as they came in—until finally word came that the general was indisposed. He had indeed come to the White House, everyone was told, but one of his myriad physical ills—known to include gout, rheumatism, and dropsy—had compelled him to retire to a guest bedroom upstairs for the remainder of the evening.41
This was untrue. Scott was, in fact, nowhere in the mansion. Nor was his decrepitude causing him more torment than usual. The general-in-chief’s indisposition was of a political nature.
Scott had come early, summoned by an urgent note from the president. Lincoln’s brief missive had not specifed the matter at hand, but Scott knew it must involve Forts Sumter and Pickens. Indeed, he assumed that the president was finally ready to discuss evacuation plans, a conversation the general had been awaiting with growing impatience. The day after the inauguration, he had informed Lincoln bluntly that any opportunity to reinforce Sumter had long passed, and that the only question was whether its garrison could be withdrawn before the rebels attacked. A few days later, Scott even took it upon himself to draft orders for the evacuation and forward them to the War Department pending the president’s final approval. Major Anderson and his men, he said, should leave Sumter literally as soon as they could find a boat to carry them.42
Moreover, Scott knew that almost all of Lincoln’s other top advisors, as well as the heads of both major political parties in the North, shared his opinions. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic leader, had publicly endorsed evacuating Sumter. (He was also pushing a scheme to replace the old Union, at least temporarily, with a kind of North American free-trade zone stretching from Upper Canada to the Isthmus of Panama.) Seward, still considered chieftain of the Republican Party, was working more actively—and at times covertly—toward the same end. The secretary of state still believed that the Deep South might be coaxed and petted back into the Union, and, communicating through Southern intermediaries, he had continually assured Confederate authorities that Sumter would soon be in their hands, once even asking them to inform President Davis that the fort would be evacuated within three days. At cabinet meetings, nearly everyone sided with Seward: only Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general, consistently argued for reinforcement. Even as uncompromising a radical as Senator Sumner made it known he was ready to yield to the inevitable.43
It was with much self-confidence, then—and not a little condescension—that General Scott met Lincoln before the first White House dinner. At six foot five and more than three hundred pounds, Scott was one of the few men in Washington who towered physically over the president. His opinion of his new commander-in-chief had never been especially high; back in November, he’d snorted that if he’d ever laid eyes on the former Illinois congressman during his brief stint in Washington, he certainly couldn’t recall it. Presidents might come and go—he had served eight of them in his years as general-in-chief—but the hero of Lundy’s Lane and Veracruz remained. Scott took it for granted, naturally, that he would steer the administration’s military policies himself. Now he barely gave Lincoln a chance to speak before he began lecturing the president about the Southern forts, and unfolded a memorandum on the subject he had penned earlier that day. Not only must Sumter obviously be evacuated, he said, but Fort Pickens as well. Such a gesture of magnanimity toward “our Southern friends,” Scott opined, would unquestionably keep the Upper South in the Union, and might even bring South Carolina and Florida back in. (Actually, the general was far from certain about this last part: in private letters and conversations with others, including Seward, he suggested that the loyal states would ultimately have to let their wayward sisters depart in peace.) He had, he added helpfully, asked his secretary to draw up detailed instructions for the withdrawals of troops. These he offered for the president’s approval.44
But the president, far from thanking Scott for his wisdom and diligence, was turning pale with anger. The general’s plan, Lincoln told a confidant the next day,
had given him “a cold shock.” Abandon Sumter and Pickens to the Confederates? Moreover, how dare he instruct the president on matters of statecraft? The old soldier had overstepped his bounds, blundering off the military path into the thickets of politics, an area that had never been his strong suit, to put it mildly. (Scott had run for president in 1852 on the Whig ticket; his prodigious ineptitude on the campaign trail had helped seal the party’s demise.)45
In fact, Lincoln had summoned Scott to the White House to talk not about evacuating Sumter but about reinforcing it—and to tell the general to be ready to implement plans for sending in food and supplies. Anderson had “played us false,” the president snapped: the major, for reasons of his own, had been misleading his superiors about the true feasibility of holding on to the fort.46 If Scott was not prepared to carry out his orders, Lincoln concluded coldly, he would find some other person who might do so.47
The general, crimson-faced, stuffed his memorandum back into his tunic and hastily departed, stomping out of the White House just as the first guests were arriving for dinner. It had taken as great an insult as this to make Winfield Scott pass up a meal.
The president played the genial host to perfection that evening. But William H. Russell, the canny journalist, noticed how his homespun stories always seemed to serve some deeper purpose, how he camouflaged himself in the “cloud of merriment” like a magician slipping away in a puff of smoke.48 At the end of the meal, the cabinet officers were startled when Lincoln, with an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, asked them to linger for a few minutes after the other guests had departed. He revealed the truth about General Scott’s absence and told them to return in the morning for an important meeting.
The president could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, his mind racing as it turned over, again and again, the problem of the forts.49
But after months of vacillation and evasion, Lincoln had finally begun showing his mettle—an early sign of the decisiveness that would eventually come to characterize his leadership. Unlike most around him, he was thinking of Sumter in terms of its symbolism not just for the South (as the secessionists had defined it) but for the North. For almost six months, Union forces had been in retreat as the rebels pressed relentlessly forward. Beyond the corridors of power in Washington, in towns and cities throughout the loyal states, Americans were sinking into despair at their leaders’ apparent impotence.
“The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers,” wrote George Templeton Strong, who had voted for Lincoln. “We are a weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national existence.” Indeed, after all the failed attempts at compromise, it was becoming clear to millions of Americans that nothing less than this—America’s very existence as a nation—was now at stake. Acquiescence to secession would bring disgrace before the eyes of the world, proving that the republic had carried within itself, ever since its birth, the seeds of its own destruction. Submission to the South’s demands would be tantamount to the same thing, making a travesty of majority rule.
Newspapers of both parties savaged the new administration. It was beginning to seem, one Republican editor in Wisconsin wrote, that “the North must get down on its knees and ask Jeff Davis for the ‘privilege to breathe.’ ” A Pennsylvania paper quoted a Democratic congressman as calling Lincoln “vain, weak, puerile, hypocritical,” “the weakest man who has ever been elected,” and “a cross between a sandhill crane and Andalusian jackass.” The exact nature of that last hybrid may not have been altogether evident, but it was clearly not meant to be complimentary.50
Since the very beginning of the secession crisis, the only glimmer of national pride had come with the surprise occupation of Fort Sumter back in December, the moment greeted with cheers and cannon salutes throughout the North. Whatever Major Anderson’s true feelings and motives, he and his small band of men were as yet the Union’s only heroes: the “Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” as P. T. Barnum had dubbed them. Could it be that Barnum had his finger on the North’s pulse, more than Secretary Seward and all the wise heads in Washington?
The move to Sumter had been a declaration that the nation would fight rather than surrender its integrity; the fort had become the Unionists’ sole emblem of defiance and steadfastness rather than compromise and withdrawal. Surrendering now would mean more than just giving up two acres of militarily worthless federal property, more than just throwing an easy sop to the South. To many people, it would mean nothing less than abrogating American history, abandoning the heroic struggle that—within living memory—had transformed thirteen small colonies into a vast and mighty empire. As one elderly citizen of Illinois, remembering his father’s service under General Washington in the Revolution, asked plaintively, “Shall all this be thrown away to please a few villains and Traitors[?]”51
Lincoln had in any case come to doubt that the South could be appeased. Moreover, as he suggested to Scott, he had come to doubt that the military situation in Charleston Harbor was as hopeless as Anderson claimed. Two weeks earlier, Lincoln had met with an obscure former navy captain named Gustavus V. Fox. Since January, Fox had been peddling a complicated scheme he had devised to get troops, food, and supplies to Sumter. Balding, diminutive, and pear-shaped, Captain Fox had never commanded a vessel larger than a mail steamer, and since his retirement five years earlier had occupied himself chiefly in the woolens industry. The main reason his plan even got a hearing is that he happened to be married to Postmaster General Blair’s sister-in-law. Instead of trying to get a heavily armed naval squadron into Charleston Harbor, Fox proposed keeping the warships out in deep water and sending in two shallow-draft tugboats that could slip over the sandbars and sunken hulks under cover of darkness. They would have to be civilian vessels, but their steam engines could be protected from incoming fire with bales of cotton or hay. Anyhow, Fox doubted that the rebels’ heavy cannons would be able to hit small, speedy craft half a mile away, and enemy boats could be kept at bay with barrages from Sumter’s own guns.
The president was intrigued by this improbable proposal—so much so that he ordered Fox to set out for Charleston and, taking advantage of the Confederates’ lax visitation policies, inspect Sumter for himself to ascertain whether the plan was practicable. Fox would spend barely an hour talking with Major Anderson, who found the scheme—or as much of it as Fox hazarded to reveal—utterly harebrained. By that point, however, the ex-captain was so besotted with his own idea that probably nothing could have dissuaded him. Returning directly to Washington, Fox assured the president that his tugboat-and-hay-bale strategy was foolproof. Anderson, meanwhile, dashed off a quick but pointed memo to the War Department, neatly demolishing the plan in three sentences—or so he thought.52
On Friday, March 29, the day after Lincoln’s sleepless night, he convened his cabinet again at the White House. They met in his upstairs office, around a scuffed walnut table stacked high with papers.
For the past three weeks, the president had largely deferred to these men on matters of policy. Before his arrival in Washington, he had met almost none of them, and appointed them mostly according to the need to balance patronage among key states and political factions. “Neither, on the other hand, did they know him,” his secretaries Nicolay and Hay would later recall. “He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt due to themselves.… Perhaps the first real question of the Lincoln Cabinet was, ‘Who is the greatest man?’ It is pretty safe to assert that no one—not even he himself—believed it was Abraham Lincoln.”53
But now Lincoln revealed the momentous decision he had just made without consulting any of these respected statesmen: he had ordered Captain Fox to be ready to depart for Charleston Harbor in little more than a week’s time if ordered to do so. It doubtless interested the president to note that his cabinet members’ opinions, too, had begun to shift. Treasury
Secretary Salmon P. Chase, considered the group’s staunchest Republican partisan, had previously been wavering on the Sumter question. Now he came out firmly in favor of reinforcement. So did Gideon Welles, the sober-sided secretary of the navy. Still, the president did not commit himself. Perhaps Anderson was right after all. While Fox prepared his tugboats to launch, Lincoln could continue to ponder.54
Whom was the president to trust: Anderson, whose loyalty might be doubted but whose military expertise was unquestioned; or Fox, whose loyalty was indubitable but whose grasp of naval strategy seemed tenuous at best?55
The starkness of this decision, and the magnitude of the stakes, seemed too much for Lincoln to bear. The past few weeks had already taken a physical toll; those who knew him well had been astonished at how drawn and haggard he seemed. Not long after the cabinet meeting broke up, the president collapsed into bed again, incapacitated by a migraine “sick headache” such as he hadn’t had in years. For the next three days, he plunged into one of the spells of profound depression that had plagued him periodically his entire life.56
But, as in previous such moments, Lincoln’s acute mental pain seems to have culminated in a flash of clarity.57 Sometime during that awful weekend, the president had an epiphany: he needed to trust neither Fox nor Anderson—only himself. If the tugboat mission succeeded, it would be a blow to secession, a victory for the new administration, and a rallying point for Unionists (and Republicans) everywhere. Even if it failed—if the rebel guns succeeded in driving off his fleet—it would at least be proof of the administration’s resolve. Moreover, it would bring war. And this, Lincoln had come to believe, was no longer a result to be dreaded. At least not if the rebels fired the first shot.
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