Indeed, the response to Sumter seemed to manifest itself, among Northerners of every political and cultural hue, as a kind of flag mania. Along the thoroughfares of major cities, each shop and office “successively ran up its colors like a fleet of ships on the eve of the action.” On village greens and town squares—places where it had never previously occurred to anyone that the national emblem belonged—citizens gathered for solemn ceremonies around hastily erected poles. (And from that day to this, there would scarcely be a single American hamlet, no matter how tiny, that did not display the Stars and Stripes in its most conspicuous available spot.) Artists and intellectuals were swept up in the moment as well. The painter Frederic Church, previously known for producing landscapes of exquisite delicacy, now daubed a canvas with a garish piece of patriotic kitsch: a sunrise scene in which the clouds formed red and white stripes, with a square patch of stars twinkling against blue sky in the upper left. (This was quickly transformed into a best-selling lithograph.)119
For a century and a half, historians have struggled to explain exactly why the attack at Charleston struck such a transformative chord. Even Bruce Catton, one of the Civil War’s greatest twentieth-century chroniclers, was left scratching his head: “In the strangely revealing light of the exploding shell,” he wrote, Americans “saw something that was to carry them through four years of war. It is hard to say just what it was, for no one bothered to be explicit about it and time has dimmed it anyway.” George Bancroft, America’s most revered historian in the 1860s, did try to be explicit, and came up with a tortured explanation involving navigation rights on the Chesapeake and Mississippi. But in any case, he remembered of that April, “I witnessed the sublimest spectacle I ever saw.”120
Perhaps there was an explanatory power in the flags themselves. Two weeks after Sumter’s surrender, Henry Ward Beecher gave a sermon at his Brooklyn church to bless the colors that two local volunteer companies were carrying with them to war. With characteristic theatricality, the great preacher eulogized the flag in Christlike terms:
It was upon these streaming bars and upon these bright stars that every one of that immense concentric range of guns was aimed, when Sumter was lifted up in the midst, almost like another witnessing Calvary.… And do you know that when it was fallen, in the streets of a Southern city, it was trailed, hooted at, pierced with swords? Men that have sat in the Senate of the United States ran out to trample upon it; it was fired on and slashed by the mob; it was dragged through the mud; it was hissed at and spit upon; and so it was carried through Southern cities! That our flag … should, in our own nation, and by our own people, be spit upon, and trampled under foot, is more than the heart of man can bear! … It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution.121
Whitman expressed the same idea in plainer language—although the simple words masked deeper complexities—when he wrote: “The negro was not the chief thing: the chief thing was to stick together.”
The attack on Sumter forced Americans everywhere to pick sides: to stand either with the flag or against it—and overwhelmingly, perhaps for a multitude of individual reasons, Northerners chose to stand with it. And that expression of national unity, in turn, became the strongest possible argument for the Union itself: for the idea that the flag could shelter beneath its folds Americans of many opinions and temperaments, and that disagreement need not mean disunion. The pure wordless symbolism of a piece of cloth could represent both the deepest traditions of American radicalism and those of American conservatism. For people like Garrison and Phillips, it had become a pledge to stand firm against the slave power and uphold what they saw as the purest distillation of America’s commitment to liberty, as embodied in the Declaration. To more orthodox minds, it was a summons to defend the nation and the Constitution.
Even Emerson, the great apostle of individualism, found himself beholding with astonished admiration the “whirlwind of patriotism, not believed to exist, but now magnetizing all discordant masses under its terrific unity.” He was then in the midst of a lecture series in Boston on the relationship between “Life” and “Literature.” Amid his abstract ruminations, he had taken note of the national crisis; a few days before Sumter he had spoken of “the facility with which a great political fabric can be broken.” But the following week, he threw aside his prepared text and spoke instead from a sheaf of hastily scribbled notes. The sage went so far as to admit he had been wrong:
It is an affair of instincts; we did not know we had them; we valued ourselves as cool calculators; we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace;—and now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace; they are wiser than their teachers.… The interlocutions from quiet-looking citizens are of an energy of which I had no knowledge. How long men can keep a secret! I will never again speak lightly of a crowd. We are wafted into a revolution which, though at first sight a calamity of the human race, finds all men in good heart, in courage, in a generosity of mutual and patriotic support. We have been very homeless, some of us, for some years past,—say since 1850; but now we have a country again.… This affronting of the common sense of mankind, this defiance and cursing of friends as well as foes, has hurled us, willing or unwilling, into opposition; and the nation which the Secessionists hoped to shatter has to thank them for a more sudden and hearty union than the history of parties ever showed.122
Ironically, the Confederates’ attack on, and swift victory at, Fort Sumter turned out to be their worst strategic blunder of the war, a blunder, indeed, that may have cost the South its independence. It is difficult to see what the rebels would have lost if they had allowed Major Anderson and his tiny force to be provisioned and remain indefinitely. Indeed, they could have couched their forbearance as a humanitarian gesture, a token of their peaceful intentions, that might have won them allies not just in the North but also—all-importantly—among the nations of Europe. Certainly leaving Sumter alone would have bought them more time: time to more fully organize and equip the South’s armies; time to establish all the ordinary apparatus—a postal service, a stable national currency, a judicial system—that serve to make government a stable fact rather than a speculative figment. Both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world, the Confederate States of America might have come to seem like a fait accompli.123 Instead, Davis, his cabinet, and his generals had only a perfunctory discussion before deciding to shell the fort.
As Lincoln told a confidant: “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”
To be sure, some Americans in the North continued decrying what they saw as a misbegotten war against slavery. “A servile insurrection and the wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists,” wrote the editor of one New York paper in mid-April. “The Administration, egged on by the halloo of the Black Republican journals of this city, has sent on its mercenary forces to pick a quarrel and initiate the work of devastation and ruin.”124
A few still held out hope for a bloodless reunion. One pro-Union meeting in New York began with extravagant toasts, not to Anderson or Lincoln but to John J. Crittenden. When the venerable senator had announced his retirement when Congress adjourned in March, he made clear to his friends that he wished never to see Washington again. He then hurried home, exhausted and demoralized, to his Kentucky farm. Just after the fall of Sumter, however, with his state teetering on the brink of secession, the old politician took to the stump once more, begging his fellow Kentuckians to steer a neutral course: remain loyal to their country but take up arms against neither North nor South. The state did not secede. In the coming months, however, Crittenden would see three of his own sons march off to war: two to fight for the Union, one
for the Confederacy.125
A few abolitionists, too, could not bring themselves to join in the war fever. The farthest that Lydia Maria Child could go was to hope that someday the Stars and Stripes might be worthy of the adoration it was receiving. “Meanwhile,” she wrote to a friend, “I wait to see how the United States will deport itself. When it treats the colored people with justice and humanity, I will mount its flag in my great elm-tree, and I will thank you to present me with a flag for a breast-pin; but until then, I would as soon wear the rattlesnake upon my bosom as the eagle.”126
Child was not the only one to speculate on what war might mean for the slaves. On the morning he heard about Sumter’s fall, William Russell, the London Times’ urbane correspondent, was already in Baltimore on his way to catch a steamer bound for Charleston. Stopping for a quick shave, he asked the black barber what he made of the news. “Well, sare,” the man replied, “ ’spose colored men will be as good as white men.”127
Russell later offered this tidbit to his readers in a tone of mildly sympathetic amusement. The poor deluded Negro!
SHORTLY AFTER ANDERSON’S SURRENDER to the intrepid Wigfall, General Beauregard’s authorized aides arrived at the fort. In the end, they decided to honor the agreement that the major and the ex-senator had reached. Only Doubleday seemed irked that the battle was over: he continued to believe that it might have ended differently if his commander had worried less about avoiding bloodshed and more about defeating the enemy, maybe by trying to shell Charleston itself. Anderson, for his part, was quick to assure the Confederate envoys that he had always aimed his cannons at fortifications rather than at men, and when told that none of the secessionists had been wounded by Sumter’s fire, he lifted up his hands and exclaimed, “Thank God for that!” (Doubleday listened, fuming: “As the object of our fighting was to do as much damage as possible, I could see no propriety in thanking Heaven for the small amount of injury we had inflicted.”)128
The only term of surrender at which the Confederates initially balked was Anderson’s request to salute his flag a final time before lowering it. But in the end they allowed him to do so.
On Sunday afternoon—a day of splendid sunshine—the tattered national ensign rose again on its repaired flagpole and unfurled into a strong breeze. Anderson was determined to honor it with no fewer than a hundred cannon blasts. This was not to be. His salute, like the Union, was cloven in half. With the fiftieth shot came disaster and a terrible omen: a gun crew, exhausted by the recent ordeal, reloaded its weapon too hastily, neglecting to cool the muzzle with a thorough sponging before ramming in the powder. In the ensuing explosion, one soldier—a young Irish immigrant named Daniel Hough, well liked among the men of the garrison—was killed almost instantly, his body torn apart. Several others were badly wounded.
But there was no time to mourn the dead or care for the injured. Daniel Hough’s remains were left behind to be buried by the enemy, as so many other men’s would be in the years ahead. Still in shock, his comrades formed ranks behind Captain Doubleday and marched through Sumter’s main gate toward a waiting transport. Behind them they could hear wild cheering as the Stars and Stripes came down and a Confederate banner went up.
Early the next day—Monday, April 15—the U.S. steamer Baltic, with Major Anderson and all his men aboard, cleared the bar of Charleston Harbor and set out into open water.129
CHAPTER FIVE
The Volunteer
Senior wisdom suits not now,
The light is on the youthful brow.
—HERMAN MELVILLE,
“The Conflict of Convictions” (1860–61)
Rally at Union Square, New York, April 20, 1861 (photo credit 5.1)
Lower Manhattan, April 1861
IT WAS A DAY UNLIKE ANY the city had known before. Half a million people, or so the newspapers would report, crowded the streets between Battery Park and Fourteenth Street. If you were there among them that day, the thing that you would never forget—not even if you lived to see the next century—was the flags. The Stars and Stripes flew above the doors of department stores and town houses, from Bowery taverns and from the spire of Trinity Church, while Broadway, the New York Herald reported, “was almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery.” P. T. Barnum, not to be outdone, especially when he sensed an opportunity for attention, had strung an entire panoply of oversize banners across the thoroughfare. The national ensign even fluttered, in miniature, on the heads of the horses straining to pull overloaded omnibuses through the throngs on Fifth Avenue. The one flag that everyone wanted to see—needed to see—was in Union Square itself, the unattainable point toward which all the shoving and sweating and jostling bodies strove. No fewer than five separate speakers’ platforms had been hastily erected there, and every so often, above the ceaseless din, you could catch a phrase or two: “that handful of loyal men … their gallant commander … the honor of their country …”
If you managed somehow to clamber up onto the base of a beleaguered lamppost and emerge for a moment above the hats and bonnets of the multitude, you might glimpse what was propped up on the monument in the center of the square: cradled in General Washington’s bronze arms, a torn and soot-stained flag on a splintered staff. (One hundred forty years later, in an eerie echo of that long-forgotten day, a later generation would gather around the same statue with candles and flowers in the aftermath of another attack on the nation.) Nearby, waving a bit stiffly to acknowledge the cheers, was a lean, gray-haired officer.1 But then you lost your tenuous foothold, the gray-haired officer and his flag vanished from sight, and you were down off the lamppost again, buffeted this way and that by the odorous masses of New Yorkers, ripened by exertion and by the sunny spring day: Wall Street bankers in black broadcloth; pale, flushed shopgirls; grimy men from the Fulton docks, more pungent than anyone else, smelling of fish.
It was hard to imagine anybody swaggering through such a crowd, but here came someone doing just that—and not just one man but three abreast, nonchalant young toughs all dressed in identical, baggy red shirts. One had a fat plug of tobacco in his cheek and looked ready to spit where he pleased; another fellow none too surreptitiously pinched the prettiest of the shopgirls as he passed. Somehow, by common consent, the pressing throngs parted to let them through. They all knew exactly who these superior beings were: the fire b’hoys. And as of today, no longer simply that, either—for these b’hoys had signed their enlistment papers yesterday, and were very shortly to be sworn in as soldiers of the First New York Fire Zouaves.
On the way home after the great Union rally, you might have seen many more of them, over a thousand red-shirted recruits, crowding a park just off Fourteenth Street, arrayed in rough military formation. Uncharacteristically quiet, even subdued, they raised their brawny right arms as their colonel, the man they had just unanimously elected to lead them into war—for such was the custom still, in those early months of 1861—administered the oath.
The young colonel—he seemed, from a distance, barely more than a boy—was, unlike all his thousand-odd comrades, not a New York City fireman. He was not even a New Yorker, unless one counted his childhood far upstate. He was different in almost every way from the strapping men of his regiment, with their loose limbs and salty tongues: a small man, neat and self-contained, who never drank, or smoked, or swore. He thrilled to poetry as much as to the tattoo of drums; he had dined at the White House more often than in taverns or mess halls; and he had come not from the teeming wards of Brooklyn but from the West.
He was also one of those occasional American figures whose death, even more than his life, seemed to mark the passing away of one era and the beginning of another. He would be, briefly, the war’s most famous man. And for that moment, the entire conflict, the irreconcilable forces that set state against state and brother against brother, would seem distilled into—as one who knew him well would write—“the dark mystery of how Ellsworth died.”2
LIKE SO MANY AMERICANS of his generation, Elmer Ellsworth seemed to
emerge out of nowhere. This wasn’t quite true, but almost. In later years, some would swear they had roomed with him in a cheap boardinghouse in Washington, long before he was famous; or been his classmate at a high school in Kenosha before he suddenly dropped out and disappeared; or known him living up among the Ottawa Indians near Muskegon, where the tribe had adopted him as its chief. But no one was ever quite sure.3
Odd remnants of his diaries would eventually turn up. And his parents, at least, who would long outlive him, eventually shared everything they could recall of his boyhood. He had left home early, though. There were few enough opportunities for him there.
Ellsworth was born in the year of the country’s first great financial depression, 1837, in the small village of Malta in Saratoga County, New York. His ancestors had settled nearby before the Revolution, but the family was poor. Ephraim Ellsworth, the boy’s father, had struggled as a tailor until the Panic ruined him, forcing him to eke out a living doing odd jobs, netting wild passenger pigeons to sell for their meat, and peddling kegs of pickled oysters door-to-door on commission. His son, serious-minded and small for his age, was sent off at the age of nine to work for a man who owned a general store and saloon. Scrupulously, the boy refused to handle liquor or even—as his master expected—to rinse out the customers’ whiskey glasses.4 In a world where drunkenness was common (among children, too), he had already resolved to be different.
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