Peaceful reunification with the wayward states now seemed clearly impossible. No offer, however generous, had been good enough for the Deep South. Crittenden had failed; Corwin had failed; the Peace Conference had failed; Douglas and Seward both appeared to be failing. The real issue now was whether the Upper South could be kept from casting its lot with the rebellion. The border states still wavered, with strong pro-Union factions active in all of them. A Northern show of strength—or a Southern display of intemperate aggression—might give those Unionists a rallying point. And a demonstration that secession would inevitably mean bloodshed might scare disunionists back into the fold. Marylanders, Virginians, Kentuckians, and Tennesseeans, especially, knew that their states would become battlegrounds in the event of full-scale war—and this consideration was not to be taken lightly.
Lincoln’s decision was probably also influenced by what he had heard at the cabinet meeting. Blair must have reiterated, as he had for months, that Southerners who doubted “the manhood of Northern men,” who mistakenly thought Yankees a pusillanimous race of “factory people and shop keepers” instead of warriors, needed to be taught a lesson.58 Welles pointed out that armed resistance by the secessionists would “justify the government in using all the power at its command” to hold Sumter. But it was Salmon Chase, who just two weeks earlier had argued against provoking war, who now made the subtlest and most persuasive case for the other side. If war was now inevitable, the treasury secretary suggested, “I perceive no reason why it may not be best begun in consequence of military resistance to the efforts of the administration to sustain troops of the Union stationed, under the authority of the Government[,] in a Fort of the Union, in the ordinary course of service.”59
The last phrase of Chase’s argument was key. The administration must contrive to make the Sumter expedition seem not some covert raid, but a routine, peaceable delivery of supplies as would be made to any federal garrison. Indeed, Captain Fox, with his background delivering mail rather than cannonballs, was the perfect man to lead it.
Now Secretary Seward, who had dominated the Republicans’ response to the crisis ever since the November election, suddenly found himself left in the intolerable, impossible position of advocating what had become a minority view. This threatened not only to unravel all the webs of statecraft he had woven over the past five months but also to discredit all the public and private assurances he had given. Even worse: to make a mockery of his assumption—shared by many others—that he would be president in all but name.
On Easter Sunday, March 31, as a last-ditch effort to resurrect his hopes, Seward sat down and composed an extraordinary memo to Lincoln. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” he lectured the commander-in-chief. Any aggressive act against the South by the federal government, he wrote, would confirm the public’s belief, in both the loyal and rebel states, that the current national conflict was one “upon Slavery, or about Slavery.” Keeping the garrison at Sumter would seem like the bellicose act of a hard-line abolitionist regime. Instead, the president must continue to buy time, until the slavery issue could be buried once and for all. The crisis must be framed as a question simply of “Union or Disunion.” The best way to reunite the nation, Seward advised, was to declare war not against the South but against Spain and France, forming a grand North American and Central American alliance that would drive European colonizers permanently out of the hemisphere. (Maybe while they were at it, he ruminated, they should attack the British and the Russians, too.) No doubt Seward’s sources in the White House had informed him of the president’s sudden and mysterious illness, raising hopes that an even more astonishing proposal would be accepted, perhaps even welcomed: Seward suggested that perhaps Lincoln was not feeling up to the job of orchestrating all this complicated policy, in which case he, as secretary of state, might be willing to step in—modestly and reluctantly, of course—and take the administration’s helm.60
As Seward put the finishing touches on his memo, he was so pleased with its contents, and so confident of its success, that he sent an urgent message summoning his friend Henry J. Raymond, editor-in-chief of The New York Times, to Washington. Raymond arrived after midnight, ready to telegraph the scoop that Seward had been named premier of the new administration. First thing the next morning, Seward’s son Frederick hand delivered the memo to the White House, while Raymond stood by, with his editors in New York holding the front page open in expectation of the breaking news.61
Lincoln’s terse, stinging reply arrived within hours. In fact, he informed Seward, his administration did have a policy—it just happened not to be the one advocated by the secretary of state. Whatever needed to be done, he said, “I must do it,” though of course he would always be glad to seek his cabinet members’ advice. The president signed his letter—surely not without irony?—“Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln.”62
The telegram Raymond sent to the Times was briefer than anticipated. “Nothing more,” it read.63
Seward’s memo, insulting as it was, steeled Lincoln’s nerves, rousing him fully from the funk of the past several days. He, the upstart lawyer from Illinois, had now bid defiance to both the nation’s most powerful soldier and to its most powerful politician. The path ahead would be his alone. He also realized now that he could no longer rely solely on the wise old men of his cabinet for information and advice. Recalling the candid letters he had received the prior autumn from one of the artillery captains at Fort Sumter, the president contacted Mary Doubleday, asking if she would mind sharing any of her husband’s correspondence that might shed unbiased light on the circumstances in Charleston Harbor. Mrs. Doubleday, after busying herself with a pair of scissors to excise the purely personal passages of Abner’s recent letters, gave several excerpts to Lincoln. “If Government delays many days longer,” one read, “it will be difficult to relieve us in time, for the men’s provisions are going fast.”64
Letting the garrison be starved out would be equivalent to surrender. War must not only come but come soon.
As Fox hurriedly readied his expedition to embark from New York, Lincoln took stock of the Union’s military preparedness. On the same day Seward received his presidential rebuke, a White House courier arrived at the War Department with one for the general-in-chief. “Would it impose too much labor on General Scott,” the president’s note asked tartly, “to make short, comprehensive, daily reports to me of what occurs in his department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence? If not, I will thank him to do so.”
What Lincoln learned was not encouraging. In the entire country east of the Mississippi, the United States Army numbered fewer than four thousand men—several thousand fewer than the rebel forces at Charleston alone. Only a few hundred men defended such places as New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and even Washington itself. Most of the national military was stationed in forts along the trails of the Far West and the Pacific coast. In all, the troops totaled just over seventeen thousand enlisted men and officers, many of whom could be expected to defect to the South once hostilities began. Even the military bureaucracy was almost laughably undermanned. The entire War Department had only ninety-three employees, from Secretary Simon Cameron down to the file clerks. No wonder Scott and Seward, poring over the columns of these statistics in the most recent departmental annual reports, were so anxious to avoid the clash of arms, or at least delay it.65
Yet Lincoln, the Sangamon County militiaman, would step decisively into his role as commander-in-chief. This new assertiveness, too, would require him to look beyond War Department memos and official chains of command in Washington. Outside the purview of General Scott, Secretary Cameron, and their assorted file clerks, American citizens in the loyal states were arming themselves—in fact, had been doing so for months. Companies of Wide Awakes that had marched with lit torches to celebrate the Republican victory in November were now
drilling with muskets. And amid the excitement that followed the occupation of Sumter, men throughout the North had formed new militia companies, “putting on their war paint to fight for the Union,” as one newspaper had reported back in January. By the end of that month, according to one estimate, nearly half a million had pledged to take up arms against secessionist treason.66
The White House mail bags bulged with more and more letters like the one that arrived in mid-March from an old Springfield acquaintance, James L. Hill. Addressing his letter to “Dear Old Abe,” Hill wrote:
We hear with pain and regret that you are debating about evacuating Sumter lowring our Glorious old Flag that Washington through so many trials and Privations unfurled and sustained to be trampled on by traitors and to be made the hiss and scoff of the World. Do you know that Genl Washington or Jackson never said “I cant”[?] … Say the word By the Eternal Fort Sumter shall be reinforced and that glorious old Flag sustained and my word for it 100,000 good and true men with Jim Hill amongst them will at once respond to the call.… You are now the head of this nation and of course know more and better than we the reasons that are leading to this result but for Gods sake for Humanity and for your own honor dont let that word Cant form any part of the reasons.67
Perhaps Lincoln was remembering Hill’s letter the following month when—just after the Sumter attack—leaders of the Young Men’s Christian Association visited the White House to make one last plea for compromise. “You gentlemen, come here to me and ask for peace on any terms,” Lincoln told them. “You would have me break my oath and surrender the government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—there is no honor or manhood in that.”68
On April 6, Lincoln met at the White House with the governors of Indiana, Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, whom the ardently Republican editor Horace Greeley had marshaled to deliver a hard-line message to the president. All were ready to proffer troops. From Pennsylvania came news that the state legislature had appropriated half a million dollars to arm its militia, readying it to march southward at a moment’s notice in defense of the nation’s capital.69
That same evening, Lincoln also made a decision that perhaps no career military officer would have made: he gave the enemy advance notice of Captain Fox’s arrival. In a message to Governor Pickens of South Carolina, Lincoln announced that vessels were on their way with provisions—but not arms or reinforcements—for Anderson’s men. Furthermore, barring an attack by the Confederates, Lincoln pledged no future military reinforcement of Sumter. He had, in fact, completely changed the purpose of the mission. It was now not merely destined to fail—as perhaps Lincoln had known all along it would be—but designed to do so. He would force the Confederates’ hands: either they would bow to federal authority, or they would unleash their artillery on tugboats that had come to relieve starving men, becoming aggressors in the eyes of the entire world.70
Three days later, on the gray morning of April 9, the little flotilla under Fox’s command steamed past Sandy Hook and out into the open Atlantic amid heavy seas.71
ON THE LAST DAY OF PEACE, Abner Doubleday found a potato. It had been kicked into a corner and stepped on but was not too badly squashed, so he dusted it off as best he could and stowed it away for safekeeping. In a few days’ time, he knew, he might be glad he’d done so. The officers were down to half-rancid pork and a bit of the rice; the privates were issued one hardtack biscuit each as rations for the entire day.72
The morning was clear and bright; full southern spring had come at long last. All around the fort, Charleston Harbor stirred with activity. Small steamers ferrying men and supplies among the various Confederate outposts passed insolently right beneath the guns of Sumter. Sometime before dawn, an odd boxlike structure, like a large floating coffin, had been towed out to the point of Sullivan’s Island and left inside the breakwater, its four square gun ports staring across the water like the eye sockets of a skull. This odd contraption clad in iron boilerplate—presaging later inventions that this war would inspire—the federal troops recognized as the Floating Battery, which the rebels had designed to be moved wherever they needed extra firepower. The now familiar Confederate flag flew from its gabled end. As Crawford noted, its new position, reinforcing the battery that the enemy had unmasked a few days earlier, made it utterly impossible for Fox’s tugboats to reach Sumter without being blown to splinters. (Across the harbor, on Cummings Point—just over half a mile from Sumter’s vulnerable gorge wall—the Carolinians had built a similar structure on land, the Iron Battery, with a metal roof angled to deflect cannonballs.) Perhaps most ominous of all, the rebels towed three wooden hulks out and moored them not far from the fort. At dusk they could be set afire and, lighting up Sumter’s brick walls with their reflected flames, let the enemy gunners take aim by night.73
Late that afternoon, a small boat came creaking and splashing toward the fort’s wharf, a white flag of truce fluttering at its stern. There were nine men aboard: three white and six black. The three white men were Confederate officers. Two of them, trusted aides to General Beauregard, had come to offer terms of surrender. The third had joined them as a representative of Governor Pickens—and also because, as he later explained, he was fortunate enough to be “the owner of a large six-oared boat and six superior oarsmen,” property that he had brought to Charleston from his family plantation in case it might prove useful during the siege. Those “superior” slaves brought the Confederate envoys to Sumter.74
Beauregard’s offer was a generous one. He would send vessels to carry Anderson and all of his men to safety. They would be allowed to take their personal possessions and any of their companies’ arms and property and be granted passage to any port in the United States that they wished. And before departing, they would be permitted to salute “the flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances”—before, of course, lowering it.
The rebels clearly wanted the battle to begin before Fox’s arrival. They had no idea what sort of naval force might be accompanying his tugboats, and it made little sense to hold fire until they found out. At this moment, they sought the fort, and nothing more; certainly not a major clash of arms. Anderson courteously asked Beauregard’s aides to wait while he conferred with his staff.75
The eight officers gathered in the major’s quarters, standing around him in expectant silence. They had a decision before them, he said, that involved not only their military position but perhaps also their lives. He did not mention their honor. He did not mention their country. He read Beauregard’s missive to them aloud.
“Shall we accede?” Anderson asked his officers.76
But before they could reply, their commander unfolded another piece of paper, this one dog-eared and creased. It was the letter he had received almost four months earlier and shared with no one until now: his final, secret orders from Secretary Floyd, addressed to him at Fort Moultrie, where they had reached him two days before Christmas:
It is neither expected nor desired that you should expose your own life or that of your men in a hopeless conflict in defense of these forts. If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms in your power. This will be the conduct of an honorable, brave, and humane officer.77
The words rang strangely in the small room. They seemed to come from another eon of history. Floyd was long gone now, under congressional investigation in absentia on charges of treason and peculation in office. Buchanan was back on his farm in Pennsylvania, reviled and already half forgotten. Moultrie’s ramparts, manned now by Confederate gunners, seemed more distant and unreachable across the harbor than Sumter had ever been. How strange that Anderson should share those orders at this moment, after so many months—rather than, for that matter, reminding them about the dispatch that had come from Secretary Cameron just three days earlier, and
which could be interpreted as giving him similar latitude to capitulate when necessary. And weren’t those orders from December the ones that he had already disobeyed, in spirit if not in letter?
But Floyd’s words burned as if they somehow formed the throbbing center of the anguish that Anderson had barely concealed almost since his arrival in Charleston Harbor. They were the ones he had gone over in his mind again and again, poking and probing them like a wound: What was the honorable thing to do, not just for his own sake but for his country’s? Could honor permit opening his guns upon his own countrymen, upon the fort his father had defended long ago? Was the honorable course the same as the brave one, or might it be braver to save the nation from civil war, even at the expense of his own reputation? And what would a truly humane man, a devout man, do? How best to avoid the senseless carnage that had so horrified him along the Indian trails of Illinois and among the villages of Mexico?
The thought of Fox’s expedition turned his stomach: that foolish little man and his pathetic tugboats pounded to pieces in the harbor, along with the soldiers and sailors unlucky enough to come under his command. Just a few days before, after receiving the news, Anderson had written to the War Department: “I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.” He had sent that letter via his friend in Cameron’s office, then asked him not to deliver it. Still, his officers all knew his heart, for they had all been there on the morning of the move to Sumter, when a rebel envoy came to demand an explanation and Anderson told the man ruefully, “In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South. These gentlemen”—here he turned to the group of blue-coated officers—“know it well.”78
And yet those men knew other things about their commander, too. Most of them had been to West Point and had read—had suffered bravely through—Anderson’s manual of field artillery instruction, a book of such intricately crafted dullness that even a few paragraphs made the unfortunate cadet’s head spin and his eyeballs ache:
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