31. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861. SWC Papers.
32. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 68–69; SWC Diary, Mar. 1 and 15, 1861, SWC Papers.
33. SWC Diary, Mar. 6, 1861, SWC Papers.
34. Ibid.
35. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 19, 23, and 30, 1861; Report of the Sick and Wounded for the Quarter Ending March 31, 1861; all in SWC Papers; AD to Mary Doubleday, Apr. 2, 1861, in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.
36. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861; Foster to Capt. Lewis Robertson, Mar. 26, 1861; both in SWC Papers. OR I, vol. 1, p. 241; Michael Burlingame, unedited version of Abraham Lincoln (online at www.knox.edu/documents.pdfs/LincolnStudies), p. 237. Lincoln apparently never saw action in the war, and left the militia some weeks before the Bad Axe massacre.
37. SWC Diary, Apr. 8, 1861, SWC Papers; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 382–83; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 140; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 400; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 245–46.
38. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861, SWC Papers.
39. SWC Diary, Apr. 9, 1861; OR I, vol. 1, p. 235.
40. Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 19, nos. 3–4 (Oct. 1926–Jan. 1927), p. 50; William Howard Russell, My Diary, pp. 41–45; William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 356–58; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), pp. 51–52; William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea (Washington, D.C., 1992), p. 108.
41. Russell, My Diary, pp. 42–44. The full story of what happened that evening between Lincoln and Scott was carefully reconstructed for the first time by Russell McClintock in Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), chap. 9.
42. Erasmus Darwin Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observations of Events, Civil and Military (New York, 1884), pp. 377–79; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 201–03, 212; John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York, 1997), pp. 358–60.
43. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 205–19; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), pp. 572–75.
44. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny, p. 360; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 229–30; OR I, vol. 1, 201–02.
45. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, p. 230; Wendy Wolff, ed., A Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Diaries of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853–1859, 1861 (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 776.
46. Scott had been close to Anderson for at least twenty years. In 1842, he stood in for Anderson’s father-in-law by giving away the bride at Anderson’s wedding to Eba Clinch. Detzer, Allegiance, p. 24.
47. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 229–30; Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observations, p. 378.
48. Russell, My Diary, p. 43.
49. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 108–09.
50. Potter, The Impending Crisis, pp. 571–72; Wisconsin Daily Patriot, Mar. 21, 1861; The Argus (Easton, Pa.), n.d., quoted in Macon Daily Telegraph [Georgia], Apr. 1, 1861.
51. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, p. 222.
52. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 248–49, 369–73; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 226–29; OR I, vol. 1, 211, Robert Means Thompson and Richard Wainwright, eds., Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox (Freeport, N.Y., 1972), vol. 1, pp. 3ff.
53. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1891), vol. 3, p. 443.
54. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 231–33.
55. Fox was, in fact, not as inept as his role in the Sumter crisis made him seem. He later served ably as Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy. And, though his Sumter plan may have been misconceived, he would prove remarkably clear-sighted at least once in his life. In 1882, Fox, an avid amateur historian, undertook to locate the long-disputed landing point of Christopher Columbus in the New World, finally deciding on Samana Cay, an uninhabited islet in the Bahamas. Fox’s theory was almost wholly ignored for more than a century, but in 1986, a National Geographic study found he was correct, and Samana Cay is now accepted by many historians as the site of Columbus’s landfall.
56. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 108–09.
57. See Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy.
58. Blair to AL, Mar. 15, 1861, in AL Papers; Blair to Fox, Jan. 31, 1861, in Thompson and Wainwright, eds., Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, vol. 1, p. 4.
59. Welles to AL, Mar. 29, 1861, in AL Papers; Chase to AL, Mar. 15, 1861, and “Salmon P. Chase, Opinion on Fort Sumter, March 29, 1861,” both in AL Papers.
60. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1890), vol. 3, pp. 443–49; Seward to AL, Apr. 1, 1861, AL Papers.
61. Patrick Sowle, “A Reappraisal of Seward’s Memorandum of April 1, 1861, to Lincoln,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 33, no. 2 (May 1967), pp. 234–39; Klein, Days of Defiance, pp. 362–63.
62. AL to Seward, Apr. 1, 1861, AL Papers. It is unclear whether Lincoln ever sent his note to Seward. Nicolay and Hay thought he had, but other historians assert that he did not, since there is no surviving copy in Seward’s papers. Undoubtedly, however, Lincoln did communicate those sentiments to his secretary of state, either orally or in writing.
63. Sowle, “A Reappraisal,” p. 236.
64. Abner Doubleday to Mary Doubleday, Mar. 27 [?], 1861 [fragment], AL Papers.
65. Nicolay and Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, vol. 4, pp. 64–65.
66. Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 87–90.
67. James L. Hill to AL, Mar. 14, 1861, AL Papers.
68. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1939), pp. 233–34.
69. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 105–06.
70. Ibid., pp. 123–24; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 247–49.
71. Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 31–32.
72. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 275. Some of the hardtack that the army issued to troops in 1861 was reported to have been in storage since the end of the Mexican War in 1848. William C. Davis, A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), p. 41.
73. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers.
74. Stephen D. Lee, “The First Step in the War,” in Doubleday, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, pp. 74–75; A. R. Chisholm, “Notes on the Surrender of Fort Sumter,” in Doubleday, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, p. 82.
75. OR I, vol. 1, 13; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 423.
76. Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 423; SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers.
77. OR I, vol. 1, p. 103.
78. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 293–94; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 111.
79. Instruction for Field Artillery, Horse and Foot. Compiled by a Board of Artillery Officers (Baltimore, 1845), pp. 16–17.
80. Hay Diary, May 9, 1861, in Burlingame, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 21.
81. James Chesnut and Stephen D. Lee to Robert Anderson, Apr. 12, 1861, Robert Anderson Papers, LC.
82. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 65.
83. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 276; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 66.
84. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 141–44.
85. Ibid., pp. 143–44.
86. Ibid., pp. 145–46; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 18, 44.
87. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 67; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 146–47.
88. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 147; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 276.
89. On April 5, 1861, the New York Herald published a letter from another Sumter private, who it said had dictated the missive to a sergeant who could write.
90. Coffman, The Old Army, p. 137–41; Doubleday,
Reminiscences, appendix. I am grateful to Rick Hatcher, National Park Service historian at the Fort Sumter National Monument, for sharing with me his unpublished listing of the Sumter garrison’s names, service records, and enlistment data (which include places of birth and physical characteristics).
91. Coffman, The Old Army, pp. 137–41. A former soldier wrote, “Two-thirds of those in the service are foreigners, generally of the lowest and most ignorant class. The few Americans to be met with are men who have led dissipated lives and incapacitated themselves for any respectable business, taking up the army as a last resource [sic].”
Enlisted men even looked physically different from their superiors. Although several of Sumter’s officers—including Doubleday and Crawford—were over six feet tall, not a single private was, according to their enlistment records. The average height of the garrison’s foreign-born privates was only 5 feet, 5¾ inches, fully three inches shorter than the average American male of the mid–nineteenth century. This was almost certainly a result of poor nutrition in childhood in many cases. The average age of Sumter’s enlisted men was twenty-nine, with several of the men in their forties.
92. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers; Coffman, The Old Army, p. 205. Several of the Sumter privates’ enlistments expired during the siege, but they apparently insisted on remaining to defend the fort.
93. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” pp. 274–75. “I only wish we had a chance to give the rascals hell,” wrote another enlisted man. “We are all right, if old Lincoln will only have the backbone to stand by us.” New York Herald, Apr. 5, 1861.
94. Instruction for Heavy Artillery, Prepared by a Board of Officers, for Use of the Army of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1863), pp. 54–59; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), pp. 260–64; Mike Ryan, “The Historic Guns of Forts Sumter and Moultrie” (National Park Service study, 1997); Oliver Lyman Spaulding Jr., “The Bombardment of Fort Sumter, 1861,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1913, vol. 1, pp. 200–01.
95. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 148–49.
96. Baltimore Sun, Apr. 16, 1861: F. L. Parker, “The Battle of Fort Sumter as Seen from Morris Island,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 62, no. 2 (April 1961), p. 67; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 151, Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 66–68.
97. Boston Daily Advertiser, Apr. 24, 1861; Albany Journal, Apr. 19, 1861. In describing the battle, I have used only newspaper reports that were based on descriptions by eyewitnesses and that accord with other accounts. The Albany Journal article, for instance, is based on a clearly authentic interview with Doubleday immediately after the surrender.
98. Baltimore Sun, April 16, 1861; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” pp. 277–78; Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, pp. 32–33.
99. SWC Diary, Apr. 12, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.
100. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 54; 70–71.
101. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 278.
102. OR I, pp. 21–22; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 71; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 156–57; Albany Journal, Apr. 19, 1861.
103. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 158.
104. Charleston Courier, Apr. 13, 1861, in Baltimore Sun, Apr. 16, 1861.
105. Thompson, pp. 278–79; Crawford, p. 439; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 72; SWC Diary, Apr. 13, 1861, SWC Papers.
106. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 437–38; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 159; May Spencer Ringold and W. Gourdin Young, “William Gourdin Young and the Wigfall Mission—Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 73, no. 1 (Jan. 1972), pp. 27–33. While Wigfall and the other Confederate were distracted, the three slaves, quite sensibly, pushed their boat off and set out again for the relative safety of Fort Moultrie. The private, William Gourdin Young, noticed their departure just in time to order them back onshore at gunpoint.
107. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 279.
108. Ibid., pp. 278–79; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 439–41; SWC Diary, April 13, 1861, SWC Papers; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 72–73. The separate accounts given by Thompson, Crawford (who recounted the story twice), and Chester, who all claimed to be present for Wigfall’s arrival, coincide in most particulars but offer slightly different sequences of events and attribute somewhat different words to Wigfall, Anderson, and Thompson. My own account combines elements from all four versions but relies most heavily on Thompson’s letter to his father and Crawford’s diary entry, both written shortly after the surrender.
Wigfall himself told a rather different version of the story several days later, when he led Russell of the London Times on a tour of the vanquished fort. Wigfall recounted that the Yankee private who had first spotted him—possibly Thompson—was “pretty well scared when he saw me, but I told him not to be alarmed, but to take me to the officers. There they were, huddled up in that corner behind the brickwork, for our shells were tumbling into the yard, and bursting like—” (here the senator inserted some “strange expletives”). “I am sorry to say,” Russell noted, “our distinguished friend had just been paying his respects sans bornes to Bacchus or Bourbon, for he was decidedly unsteady in his gait and thick in speech.” William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (London, 1863), p. 107.
109. Winfield Scott to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, AL Papers.
110. Milwaukee Sentinel, Apr. 13, 1861.
111. Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Bedford, Mass., 1990), p. 78; New York Herald, Apr. 5, 1861; Alan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (Seattle, 1988), p. 182.
112. Whitman, Memoranda, p. 78; New York Tribune, Apr. 13–16, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 15, 1861; Mark Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill, 2000), p. 3; Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 15, 1861; Strong Diary, in Nevins and Thomas, p. 182.
113. Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 15, 1861; New-York Tribune, Apr. 15, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 13 and 15, 1861; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Quarterly of the Historical Society of Southern California, vol. 9, p. 122.
114. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, pp. 68–75; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 132.
115. Isaac W. Hayne to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, and H. W. Denslow to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, both in AL Papers. Information on the identity of Homer W. Denslow of Savannah is from the 1860 Census. He would later go on to serve as a Confederate officer. Hayne, the attorney general of South Carolina, had been one of the state’s commissioners to Washington during the secession crisis. Both telegrams are marked as having been received at the telegraph office in Washington on April 13, though there is no way to know when Lincoln saw them. Denslow’s reads simply: “Fort Sumter has surrendered there is nobody hurt.” Hayne offered a few more (just slightly inaccurate) details: “Fort Sumter has surrendered unconditionally & not a Carolinian hurt the stars & stripes were hauled down & the white flag raised precisely at half past one (1) oclock.”
116. New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861; Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York, 1988), p. 17.
117. James A. Garfield to Harry Rhodes, Apr. 13/14, 1861, JAG Papers.
118. Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 517–18; Liberator, Apr. 26, 1861.
119. Philadelphia Press, Apr. 15, 1861, in Nelson Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007), p. 92; Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, pp. 9–12.
120. Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (New York, 1956), p. 20; Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1: The Improvised War (New York, 1959), pp. 75–76.
121. Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, p. 8; Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England (New York, 1887), p. 297.
122. “Civilization at a Pinch,” Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, Harvard University; Eduardo Cadava, Emerson
and the Climates of History (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 28; James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887), vol. 2, pp. 599–602.
123. Cf. Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1, pp. 72–73: “Once fully established, such political separations—like those of Southern Ireland from Britain, Norway from Sweden, Pakistan from India—have a way of making themselves permanent.”
124. New York Daily News, n.d., quoted in New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861.
125. Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962), pp. 425–34, 446–48.
126. Lydia Maria Child to Mrs. S. B. Shaw, May 5, 1861, in Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1883), pp. 150–51.
127. Russell, My Diary, p. 79.
128. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 164–67.
129. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 23–24; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 171–73; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 307–10; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 447–48.
Chapter Five: The Volunteer
1. New York Herald, Apr. 19–21, 1861.
2. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
3. Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, p. 112.
4. Ruth Painter Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and the First Hero of the Civil War (Boston, 1960), p. 27.
5. Ibid, pp. 23–26. The painting is preserved in the Illinois State Historical Society.
6. George and Sarah Ellsworth, New York, pension file W.19226, National Archives.
7. See Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (Amherst, 1997), pp. 118–19.
8. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 31; Newton M. Curtis, The Black-Plumed Riflemen: A Tale of the Revolution (New York, 1846).
9. Mabel McIlvaine, ed., Reminiscences of Chicago During the Civil War (Chicago, 1914), p. 4, and Reminiscences of Chicago During the Forties and Fifties (Chicago, 1913), p. 13.
10. Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, 1997), pp. 112–13, 123.
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