The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  On the afternoon of February 23, the official inaugural train pulled into Baltimore. Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, and their children had been on board—but they left the train when it made an unscheduled stop a number of blocks before reaching President Street Station. Thus, when the train pulled into that station, the waiting crowd—perhaps assassins among them—were supremely disappointed.

  Well before this—shortly after six in the morning—Lincoln’s train arrived in Washington. As journalist Howard reported it, the president-elect, once again wrapped in his “invalid shawl,” left the sleeping car with Lamon and Pinkerton. The crowd in the depot did not recognize him. That was just what Pinkerton had hoped. Doubtless, he breathed easier, having delivered his man safely to the nation’s capital.

  But there was a price to pay. Cartoons depicting Abraham Lincoln absurdly disguised as a sickly grandma were published in hostile newspapers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, including Baltimore. It remains a subject of debate, however, whether Lincoln ever actually appeared in this get-up. Historians widely believe that the story was entirely fabricated by Joseph Howard, Jr., the Times reporter.

  * * *

  Lincoln lodged at Willard’s Hotel, on 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue, where he was soon joined by his family. They would live there until the inauguration on March 4. Elsewhere at the Willard, the Washington Peace Conference of 1861 had been underway since February 4. Convened under the sponsorship of the state of Virginia, it was a quasi-official gathering of 131 delegates from twenty-one states (including Southern states, but none of the seven seceded states) groping for one final compromise to stave off civil war. Presided over by seventy-one-year-old former president John Tyler, they were old men,—so old that one of their number dropped dead shortly after the conference convened, and the press mocked the entire proceedings as the “Old Gentlemen’s Convention.” Lincoln did not acknowledge the gathering publicly, but he did confide to one friend that “no good results would come out of it.” Nevertheless, at nine in the evening of February 23, he invited the delegates to his Willard’s parlor. A number of the delegates, including Tyler, accepted the invitation. But the meeting was none too cordial. When one Pennsylvania delegate testily proclaimed that there was no alternative to compromise, which “must be done sooner or later,” Lincoln replied, “Perhaps your reasons for compromising the alleged difficulties are correct, and that now is the favorable time to do it; still, if I remember correctly, that is not what I was elected for!” After a fruitless hour, the meeting broke up, the president-elect sending off the delegates by affirming that there would be no compromise involving the extension of slavery. The South, he said, “must be content with what it has.” And then he added the strongest condemnation of slavery he had yet uttered: “The voice of the civilized world is against it…. Those who fight the purposes of the Almighty will not succeed. They have always been, they always will be, beaten.”

  On March 1, the Peace Convention presented a handful of proposals to Congress, which simply refused to consider them. As for the Crittenden Compromise, it was narrowly defeated in the Senate on March 2, two days before the Inauguration. On that same day, Congress passed the Morrill Tariff Act, sponsored by Vermont Representative Justin S. Morrill, one of the founders of the Republican Party. It was a tariff intended to protect the industries of the North by blocking importation of manufactured goods. As the Vermonter well knew, the Southern economy relied on trade with Europe. The region exported its produce—especially cotton—in exchange for European manufactures. To the South, nothing could have been more punitive or inflammatory than the Morrill Tariff Act. It may be seen as the final nail in the coffin holding the remains of the United States.

  * * *

  On the morning of March 4, James Buchanan called upon Lincoln at Willard’s to escort him, as tradition dictated, to the inauguration platform. The day had dawned fair only to have clouded over before turning sunny again. The ceremony took place on the east portico of the new Capitol building, its still-unfinished dome giving the building an ominously decapitated appearance.

  After witnessing the swearing-in of his vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Abraham Lincoln delivered his inaugural address to a crowd of perhaps 10,000. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he announced. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so.”

  Lincoln must have hoped these words would ring with reassurance throughout the South. But he did not—could not—stop there. He continued by pointing out that “no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination … No state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.” With that, he vowed, the “power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”

  Having drawn a line in the sand, he did his best to explain the present crisis as he understood it:

  Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.

  From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is acquiescence of one side or the other.

  If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority ….

  Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people …. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left ….

  In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend it.”

  Lincoln’s logic was impeccable. But he understood that the nation had stepped far beyond reasoning, and so he concluded by appealing to what he hoped was a still-living core of national sentiment:

  I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  Having finished his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln placed his long palm, roughened by a youth lived in frontier labor, on a Bible proffered by the palsied hand of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln took the oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. What manner of nation would be left to the seventeenth, no one knew.

  3

  April 12, 1861

  General Beauregard Opens Fire on Fort Sumter

  Why it’s significant. “Black Lincoln,” the secessionists called the new president. Yet in his inaugural address, he made it clear: he would not “interfere with … slavery in the States where it exists.” He had, he said, “no lawful right to do so.” But he had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, which “expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” This, he said, required “no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it
be forced upon the national authority.” As he spoke these words, he and his audience well knew that Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and other federal installations, both military and civilian, were under threat or had already been seized by seceded states. The Constitution, Lincoln said, both required and empowered him “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts.” Lincoln promised that, “beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” The new president wanted no war, but he did mean to govern and act according to his Constitutional oath. To do less was to concede that the Union was at an end. He would make no such concession. If this refusal meant war, then war there would be.

  BY THE TIME of the Civil War, American military forts were of two kinds. In frontier regions, they were mostly lightly fortified enclosures intended to shelter troops who spent most of their time on patrol. Depending on the local availability of building materials, they were constructed either of logs or adobe. Since the principal mission of the US Army throughout much of the nineteenth century was policing “hostile” Indian tribes, frontier forts were not built to withstand cannon fire or prolonged siege. They provided shelter, supplies, and, sometimes, accommodation for soldiers’ families.

  A very different category consisted of forts built to defend against external threats, which meant attempted attack or invasion by sea. From the end of the American Revolution through the years preceding the Civil War, a system of seacoast forts was slowly built. These coastal defenses were seen as efficient and economical alternatives to maintaining either a large navy or a large field army. The forts were essentially artillery emplacements, which mounted large cannon, aimed toward the water, and capable of being elevated and—to a limited degree—swiveled. Military historians categorize the coastal forts into a First, Second, and Third System. The First System was a set of twenty small but permanent forts built from the 1790s through most of the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1807–08, President Thomas Jefferson authorized construction of the Second System, which consisted of somewhat larger and better protected forts. In some cases, these mounted two stacked tiers of guns instead of the single tier of First System forts.

  Few of the forts planned for the Second System were actually built before a Third System was authorized in 1816, after the War of 1812 proved both the reality of the trans-Atlantic threat and the inadequacy of the First and Second System forts to defend against it. As many as 200 sites were initially identified for fortification, but by 1867 only forty-two had been built—and not all of them completed. Fort construction, which was carried out mainly by civilian laborers under military supervision, typically consumed years. This was certainly the case with Fort Sumter. It was built at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, on a sandbar, which had to be augmented by some seventy thousand tons of granite laboriously transported from New England. Construction began in 1829, but the fort was still incomplete when South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860. Nevertheless, it was at that time an imposing five-sided bastion, all brick, except for the wooden buildings within the massive brick walls. The left flank wall was oriented toward the west, the left and right faces were oriented northward, and the right flank wall faced east. Each of these was 170 feet long. The rear wall, facing toward the south, was 190 feet long. All five walls were five feet thick and stood fifty feet above water level at low tide. The thickness and elevation were designed to withstand fire from ships, not from the largest land-based artillery. No one anticipated that American soldiers would ever have to fight other American soldiers. Fort Sumter was designed to accommodate a garrison of 650 and was planned to mount 135 guns arranged in three tiers. In its brief active career, however, it would never be manned or armed to capacity.

  In 1860, South Carolina was a state known for its “fire-eaters,” as the most earnestly committed secessionists were labeled. Of all the Southern states, South Carolina had the most to lose if slavery were abolished. Fifty-seven percent of its population was in bondage—the highest proportion of any state. Nearly half—46 percent—of South Carolina families owned at least one slave. It is not surprising, then, that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, on December 20, 1860. Major Robert Anderson, at the time in command of the US Army garrison at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, understood that this small collection of fortifications, some of which dated from the era of the First System, could not withstand a land assault. While the walls that stood in 1860 were built mostly of brick, the fort was more famous for the palmetto logs that formed its walls during the American Revolution. In the Battle of Sullivan’s Island (June 28, 1776), Patriot General William Moultrie successfully defended Charleston from behind those walls, the cannonballs fired by British men-o’-war bouncing off the stout palmetto. Ever since the Revolution, the palmetto served as the state’s proud emblem.

  On December 24, 1860, four days after the state’s secession, Francis Wilkinson Pickens, governor of South Carolina, dispatched three “commissioners” to Washington with instructions to negotiate the removal of “federal” troops from Fort Moultrie. Unknown to the governor, however, two days later, on December 26, Major Anderson ordered Fort Moultrie’s biggest guns to be spiked, and he burned their carriages. He then loaded the smaller artillery aboard boats and stealthily transported these, together with two companies, 127 men, of the 1st US Artillery, to the far more formidable Fort Sumter, which he believed could be more readily defended. His hope was that he could hold out against an attack long enough to receive resupply and reinforcements as well as naval support. The fort, left incomplete after President James Buchannan cut the military budget, mounted fewer than half the guns for which it was designed. The small artillery pieces Anderson had hauled from Moultrie were to be pointed at Charleston and other fortified positions.

  The next morning, December 27, local workmen employed at Fort Sumter left their jobs, returned to Charleston, and spread the news: the federals had moved from Moultrie to Sumter. A public outcry arose against Pickens. How could he have failed to anticipate what Anderson had done? The people of South Carolina had already seceded from the United States. In their outrage, they would hardly hesitate to remove their governor. He therefore sent Colonel J. Johnston Pettigrew, his military aide, to meet with Major Anderson at Fort Sumter and “request” that he return to Fort Moultrie. When Anderson politely declined, Pettigrew reported to Pickens, who ordered him to lead a unit of militia to preemptively seize another local fort, Castle Pinckney. Finding nothing more there than a single US Army lieutenant, one private, and a handful of civilian workmen, Pettigrew had no problem capturing the Castle. Later that same day, South Carolina militia occupied the abandoned Fort Moultrie as well.

  Pickens telegraphed the news of Sumter’s occupation to the three commissioners he had sent to Washington. In the name of the people of South Carolina, they duly vented their outrage against President Buchanan, who they assumed had treacherously ordered the occupation. Clueless as always, Buchanan had no idea of what they were talking about because he had no idea of what Anderson had done. After the indignant commissioners left, the president summoned his cabinet. His inclination was to order Anderson back to Fort Moultrie—nobody having told him that it was now in Confederate hands. Cabinet members persuaded him instead to let Anderson and his men stay where they were. Quite probably because this fait accompli required no immediate decision on his part, Buchanan agreed.

  To his consternation, however, he soon found himself pressed to make a very difficult decision. Should he send reinforcements and supplies to Major Anderson? If he did this, South Carolina—perhaps the whole “Confederacy”—would likely be provoked to military action. If he did not do this, he would be abandoning Fort Sumter and its garrison, and would, in effect, be condoning the dissolution of the Union. On January 2, 1861, the president therefore decided to send supplies and reinforcements—but to do so in what he believ
ed would be the least provocative manner. He would load the reinforcements, 200 troops, and supplies into a chartered, unarmed civilian steamer, the 1,172-ton Star of the West. Second, he ordered the soldiers to dress in civilian clothes rather than uniforms. Unfortunately for the president, word of his civilian-looking mission had leaked southward shortly after the vessel left New York. By December 8, when the Star of the West anchored at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, Pickens had managed to set up artillery batteries on Morris Island and had recruited cadets from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, to man them. On the morning of December 9, as the vessel sailed into the harbor, the cadets fired. The first shot was a warning across the ship’s bow, and although it was quite sufficient to prompt the defenseless captain to turn about and head back toward the mouth of the harbor, the zealous youths fired several more shots, scoring three hits, which did little damage—but did send the Star of the West steaming back north to her home port of New York City.

  Anderson and his men had witnessed the whole thing from Fort Sumter. Some of the major’s men pleaded with him to open fire on Morris Island and, if necessary, on Fort Moultrie as well. Citing his orders from President Buchanan, which directed him to remain on the defensive only, Anderson refused, but he did fire off a letter of protest to Governor Pickens demanding that he disavow the act of shooting at the flag of the United States. Pickens not only refused the disavowal, he ordered as many cannon as could be found to be mounted on every available battery position facing Fort Sumter. Once he was satisfied that his firepower was sufficiently massive, Pickens sent a note demanding that Anderson surrender the fort. This was on January 11. Anderson refused.