The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  When it became clear that Lincoln was not going to order the evacuation of Sumter, Charleston military commander General P. G. T. Beauregard sent word to Anderson requesting that he surrender. While Anderson thanked Beauregard for the “fair, manly and courteous terms proposed,” he refused the offer on the grounds that such actions would be tantamount to shirking his duty; while he and his men possessed even meager supplies, they would defend their fort. But he informed Beauregard's emissary, Colonel James Chesnut: “If you do not batter us to pieces, we will be starved out in a few days.” Anderson said he would evacuate the fort on April 15, once his provisions were exhausted, which would allow him and his men to leave the fort with their honor intact. He would take this action only if the Confederates committed no hostile act against the fort or the United States flag that waved above it, and providing he received no additional provisions (or orders) from his government; if he received more food, his men would stay on at the fort.

  The chess game continued. Who would make the next move and what would it be?

  Jefferson Davis, his military leaders, and the South acted next. Davis believed that the North was the aggressor, regardless of whether Lincoln's supply ships were armed or not. “The order for the sailing of the fleet was a declaration of war,” he said. “The responsibility is on their shoulders, not ours…. A deadly weapon has been aimed at our heart. Only a fool would wait until the shot has been fired.” Lincoln's plan meant one thing and one thing only, Davis said: “The assault has been made. It is of no importance who shall strike the first blow or fire the first gun.”

  Lincoln's claim that replenishing Sumter's food supplies did not constitute an act of aggression was rejected by the Confederates, who viewed it as deceitful and underhanded. At an April 9 meeting, Davis and his lieutenants decided that they were left with only one choice to preserve their honor, blunt Lincoln's aggressive gambit, and mollify Southerners who demanded action to establish the credentials of the new Confederacy. They needed to attack and reduce Fort Sumter before the supply ships arrived in Charleston Harbor.

  The ships were due sometime between April 13 and April 15, so at 3:20 A.M. on April 12, Colonel Chesnut dictated the following note to Major Anderson at Fort Sumter: “By authority of Brigadier General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.”

  At 4:30 A.M. the first long, arcing shell was fired at the fort, beginning a thirty-six-hour bombardment during which Confederates lobbed somewhere between four thousand and five thousand shells at the federal fort in Charleston Harbor. Charlestonians gathered on balconies, wharves, and rooftops along the Battery to watch the shelling, which illuminated the night sky with fiery red tracers and choked the daytime sky with smoke from bursting shells. “I knew my husband was rowing about in a boat somewhere in that dark bay,” Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary the morning of the attack. When she heard the booming of cannon, she “sprang out of bed, and on my knees prostrate I prayed as I never prayed before.”

  Meanwhile, in the fort, Anderson and his men were being battered; they sustained no casualties in the attack on Fort Sumter, but hot shot rained down upon them, igniting personal effects and the living quarters, and chunks of the fort's walls and parapets were blown away by the Confederate shells. Fires broke out in several places inside the fort. Anderson did not return fire from Fort Sumter; his ammunition supply, along with his food, was nearly gone. Finally, at just after 1 P.M. on Saturday, April 13, Anderson ordered the American flag taken down.

  After negotiations with Confederate emissaries that evening, arrangements were made to evacuate the fort on Sunday morning, April 14. Anderson asked for terms that included his troops being allowed to salute the flag one last time and fire fifty two-gun salutes as they marched from the fort onto waiting Confederate transport ships. Most of the evacuation occurred without incident, but toward the end, an ignited cartridge from the hundred-gun salute set off an explosion when it mixed with other ammunition. Two of Anderson's soldiers were killed and four others hurt. Anderson could hardly bear the irony of losing two men in a freak accident after protecting his entire garrison during the pounding of Fort Sumter.

  With that, the Confederate and South Carolina palmetto flag were raised above Fort Sumter, to wild cheers from spectators on shore and the roar of guns fired in salute from Confederate ships in the harbor. Charleston residents celebrated late into the night, with bonfires and fireworks crackling all along the shore. They were jubilant that Fort Sumter had fallen without the loss of a single Southern soldier or sailor. “Wonderful, miraculous, unheard of in history, a bloodless victory,” one woman wrote.

  Later in the day, South Carolina Governor Andrew Pickens delivered a rousing speech from the balcony of the Charleston Hotel. “We have met them,” he shouted. “Let it lead to what it might, even if it leads to blood and ruin…. We have met them and conquered them. We have humbled the flag of the United States before the Palmetto and Confederate…today it has been humbled before the glorious little state of South Carolina!”

  An awful war had begun, one that would plunge the nation into a nightmare that would require it to pay a ghastly price for its preservation. In the words of historian Maury Klein, when America finally emerged from Civil War almost exactly four years later, “secession was dead, slavery was dead, the world of chivalry was dead, the old Federal Republic of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster was dead, Abraham Lincoln was dead, and upward of 620,000 Americans were dead, a number greater than the total of all the men who died in every other war the United States has fought.”

  The news from South Carolina about Fort Sumter infuriated and unified the North. “I never knew what a popular excitement can be,” wrote one Harvard professor. “The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favors and flags.” In New York City, more than a quarter-million people turned out for a pro-Union rally in a place that once harbored strong pro-Southern sentiments. “The time before Sumter was like another century,” wrote one New York woman. “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now.” Even Democrat Stephen Douglas got swept up in the pro-Union fervor when he told a huge crowd in Chicago: “There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.”

  On April 15, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling on Northern states to commit 75,000 militiamen to suppress the Southern rebellion. This led to two critical moves—the mustering of troops across the North and the decision by Virginia, the most important upper South state, to secede. Otherwise, under the terms of Lincoln's order, Virginians would be asked to take up arms against South Carolinians. In May, Virginia seceded (bringing to the Confederacy a brilliant military commander named Robert E. Lee), while ardent pro-Union forces in western Virginia split off from the state, and in June, formed the Union state of West Virginia.

  If South Carolina fired the opening salvo to destroy the Union, then it made sense that its alter ego in every way, Massachusetts, would be the first state to respond to Lincoln's call to begin the country's restoration. Governor Andrew quickly ordered out the first wave of troops: the Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Massachusetts Regiments. On April 17, the Sixth Massachusetts left Boston by train en route to Washington to defend an unprotected capital—huge crowds cheered as the train left, as Bostonians rushed to support the war from all quarters. Even abolitionists, who normally deplored bloodshed, saw the war as a chance to abolish slavery forever. If war put an end to “that execrable system,” said William Lloyd Garrison, this war would be “more glorious in history” than the American Revolution. Charles Sumner wrote: “At last the war has come. The day of insincerity and duplicity is now passed, & all the cabinet is united in energetic action. It will be needed, for the Slave States will be united.”

  Bo
ston's support for the war grew only more strident and united when the city received word that the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment had been set upon by a mob in Baltimore on April 19 and four of its members killed—the first battle casualties of the Civil War. Maryland was a border state and clashes between pro-Union and pro-Southern sympathizers were relatively common. Across Massachusetts, outraged residents, newspaper editors, clergymen, and politicians focused on the historic date of the attack, drawing parallels between the actions of the Sixth and the “shot heard ‘round the world” in Lexington, Massachusetts, that opened the American Revolution in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775.

  Any vestige of empathy for the South, any hope that war could be avoided, was obliterated with the news from Baltimore. Militiamen and merchants alike in Boston, who were stunned by the civilian attack on American soldiers, demanded revenge and full support for the war effort. Those feelings reached a fever pitch when word arrived from Richmond that thousands of Virginians participated in a torchlight celebration to honor the heroic acts of “the gallant Baltimoreans” who had attacked the Sixth.

  Across the city of Boston, young men rushed to enlist, the wealthy contributed funds to the war effort, and women signed up to aid the wounded. Governor Andrew, heartened by the response, pledged that he would always remember “that great week in April when Massachusetts rose up at the sound of the cannonade of Sumter, and her Militia brigade, springing to arms, appeared on Boston Common.”

  On the evening before the Massachusetts Sixth was attacked, Charles Sumner ran into his own problems in Baltimore. On his way home from Washington, he stopped in the Maryland city to rest overnight, registered at Barnum's Hotel, and walked to a family friend's house for tea.

  On his way back to the hotel, around 9:00 P.M. on April 18, Sumner spotted a large, violent crowd gathered in the square in front of his hotel, shouting and shaking their fists. Looking to avoid the scene, Sumner slipped into a side door of the hotel, where he was met by a worker who delivered a shocking message: “That mob in the square is for you,” he said. “They were told that you were out—that nobody knew where you were, and that you had probably left town.” The pro-Southern mob was not convinced and continued to scream for Sumner, the man they held most responsible for the current Northern aggression against the South.

  Sumner spoke to the owner of the hotel, who requested that he leave the premises, fearing that the mob would storm the lobby; the proprietor also said the hotel could not guarantee Sumner's safety. Sumner replied that there was nowhere else for him to go, that he refused to return to his friend's house, where the mob could bring its wrath upon an innocent person, and that the hotel had an obligation—because Sumner had paid for lodgings—to provide him with a room. The Barnum management finally relented, and tucked Sumner into a third-story room without even informing the staff of his new location. From the window of his new room, which opened on the street at the side of the hotel, Sumner could see the enormous crowd, swaying and calling for him.

  Early in the gray dawn, after the mob had dissipated, Sumner boarded a train for Philadelphia. On the way north, the south-bound train carrying the Massachusetts Sixth passed him, and he was “struck by the gayety of soldier life, which overflowed” as the train went by. Upon his arrival in Philadelphia, Sumner learned by telegraph of the attack upon the Massachusetts soldiers.

  Shaken by his own near-miss in Baltimore and the attack on Massachusetts soldiers, Sumner felt a need to speak to other troops. On April 21, still traveling toward Boston, he met the Third Battalion of Massachusetts Rifles, commanded by Major Charles Devens, at the New York armory. Devens ordered his battalion into line, and Sumner addressed them.

  Amid applause and cheers, he thanked them for their service and for the mission they were undertaking. He felt he had done his part for the antislavery cause, now the cause was in their hands. “Elsewhere it has been my part to speak,” he told the troops. “It is your part now to act.” He told the Massachusetts men that his “soul was touched” when he heard that members of the Sixth had fallen in Baltimore. “And yet, he added: “When I thought of the cause for which they met death, I said to myself, that, for the sake of Massachusetts, ay, and for their own sake, I would not have it otherwise.” Indeed, Sumner said, the fallen heroes of the Sixth “have died well, for they died at the post of duty, and so dying, they have become an example and a name in history.” The Rifle Battalion cheered wildly.

  Sumner did not minimize the dangers these troops would face, “the hardships and perils in your path,” but urged them to be brave in the duty for which they had been called. “And if you need any watchword, let it be, Massachusetts, the constitution, and FREEDOM!” Again the troops roared their approval and surrounded Sumner, shaking his hand and thanking him for his words and for his role in the Union cause. The United States senator from Massachusetts, who had never been elected by popular vote, was now the North's most important, powerful, and influential figure—and as they headed off to war, these Massachusetts troops let him know of their devotion and admiration.

  Outside of Richmond, Virginia, on June 29, Mary Chesnut was caring for Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (L. Q. C. Lamar), who suffered from apoplexy and had been brought from his camp to a makeshift hospital where Chesnut and other women were assisting Confederate soldiers.

  Lamar, a lawyer from Mississippi, had won his first race for Congress in 1857 at age thirty-two. Like most Southern politicians of his time, he was a firm supporter of states' rights and slavery. He resigned his congressional seat in January 1861 and had written the official Mississippi Ordinance of Secession. He now served as a lieutenant colonel of the 19th Mississippi Regiment.

  Now, as Mary Chesnut fanned and brushed flies away from the prostrate Lamar, the two talked of war between North and South. Lamar proffered that the hatred between the two sections had boiled over, that the fight had to come. He told Mary Chesnut that he could trace the inevitability of the war back to one event that occurred on May 22, 1856: “If the athlete Sumner had stood on his manhood and training when Preston Brooks assailed him, Preston Brooks's blow need not have been the opening skirmish of the war,” Lamar lamented. “Sumner's country took up the fight because he did not. Sumner chose his own battle-field and it was the worse for us.”

  Lamar then succinctly summed up the impact of the caning upon the South: “What an awful blunder that Preston Brooks business was!”

  EPILOGUE

  In the late afternoon of March 16, 1874, Henry Wilson, vice president of the United States, stood stoically beside an open grave in the dusky shadow of a large oak tree in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next to him, heads bowed in prayer, stood Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

  All of them had accompanied the casket from the start of the extraordinary funeral procession: from the Massachusetts State House, where the body had lain for thousands of mourners to view; to the brief prayer service at King's Chapel; and then for the trip down Cambridge Street to Beacon Street to Charles Street, across the Charles River Bridge into Cambridge; past the deceased's alma mater, Harvard College, and finally to Mount Auburn, where the cortege arrived just as the late-winter sun was setting. Pallbearers “reverently and by tender hands” placed the casket by the side of the grave, while outside the cemetery's wrought-iron gates, thousands of people clustered to glimpse the burial and honor the late statesman who had helped change the nation's history during one of its darkest periods, and had paid dearly for his efforts.

  Charles Sumner was dead, and Boston and all of America were grieving the loss of the country's most passionate, vociferous, and unwavering, antislavery champion. One publication summed up the senator's accomplishments, and thus, the impact of his death: “No man in this generation has done more to advance the cause of equal liberty for mankind,… No death in the country, since that of Mr. Lincoln [after assassination in 1865] has caused a deeper feeling of sorrow.”


  ——

  The heart attack that claimed Charles Sumner's life occurred during the early morning hours of March 11, 1874, while the senator was at his Washington, D.C., home on Vermont Avenue and H Street, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. When word spread across the city that the sixty-three-year-old Sumner had been stricken, small groups of well-wishers—black and white alike—congregated quietly outside his house. With his close friends gathered at his bedside, Sumner's last phrases were, “Tell Emerson I love and revere him,” and “Don't let the civil rights bill fail” (Sumner was working on a post-Reconstruction bill to advance the cause of Southern blacks that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875). Among his deathbed visitors in Washington was the former slave Frederick Douglass, but the senator did not recognize him in the moments before his death.

  At 2:50 P.M., while his old friend George T. Dowling held his hand, Sumner gave a “convulsive moment” and grasped Downing's hand so powerfully that he almost crushed it. Sumner died a minute later.

  Congress voted to set aside Friday, March 13, for funeral services in the Capitol. Douglass led a “great assemblage of colored men,” who followed Sumner's hearse to the Capitol, where thousands of mourners were waiting. Sumner's coffin was placed in the center of the great rotunda on the black catafalque where Lincoln's body had rested nine years earlier. “It was the first time in American history that a Senator's memory had been so honored,” historian David Donald pointed out.