In his March 4, 1861, inaugural address, tucked between the leaves of the olive branch of peaceful reconciliation with the South, Abraham Lincoln inserted his determination to use "all the power at my disposal" to hold federal property and enforce its laws--everywhere. The right of secession did not exist, he said; the Union was perpetual and indissoluble.
Those whom he referred to as "my dissatisfied fellow countrymen" thought otherwise. When Lincoln assumed his office, the Confederate States of America had been an accomplished fact for fully a month, at least on paper. Its leaders had framed a constitution, established the executive and congressional branches of government, chosen Jefferson Davis of Mississippi for its president, and commenced the task of raising an army for its own defense. Their motivations may have been mixed. A few had wanted to separate from the North and the old Union for more than a generation. Others found a fatal threat to slavery in the swelling population of the free states and their inevitable expansion westward. Some feared that government in Washington was growing too strong and that, backed by a free state majority in Congress, it could force unwelcome economic and social evils on the South.
There was no "solid" South, then or later. A host of often conflicting interests made up the southern constellation. While one-fourth of southern whites who were eligible to own slaves actually did own them, the other three-fourths of the decision-making population, mostly poor white farmers, felt little common cause with the planter oligarchs who governed in most states. In every new Confederate state there were serious political, social, and economic divisions between the peoples of the hilly and more isolated interior and the rulers who lived on the coastal tidewater plains. However, as is so often the case, the potential threat of outside interference could bind all sides on at least the one paramount common interest of self-defense. That threat of Lincoln's to use "all the power" at his disposal did more to bring the majority of Southerners together as Confederates than all the speeches of the politicians and the fire-eating demagogues.
Lincoln's stated determination to hold federal property was to be the sticking point, for he must take back what Southerners were now taking from the Union. A host of fortresses, arsenals, customs houses, treasury branches, and more were spotted throughout the South, easy targets for the secessionists. Indeed, hardly was secession accomplished before the southern firebrands began seizing federal buildings. On December 27, 1860, South Carolina militia occupied Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney at Charleston--without incident. Three days later they took the city's federal arsenal. A week later, even before seceding, Alabama soldiers seized the arsenal at Mount Vernon, and Georgians grabbed Fort Pulaski near Savannah from its garrison--a sergeant and a civilian caretaker. In the weeks that followed, forts at Mobile, Alabama; St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida; New Orleans; and elsewhere continued to fall into the hands of the secessionists.
Either ungarrisoned completely or else manned by a few caretakers, the forts were easy prey. So were the rest of the southern arsenals and public buildings. Arguing that these installations, being upon southern soil, were therefore southern property, the seceding states asserted their unquestioned right to them. President Lincoln, on the other hand, assumed the position that the forts and other facilities had been--and still were--the property of all the people of the old federal Union. Refusing to recognize the right or even the possibility of secession, he saw it clearly as his duty to hold what he could and reclaim what he lost. As far back as December, he had privately declared that if such federal property--and especially the forts at Charleston--should fall into the hands of the secessionists, then the Union "must retake them."
From the very first, it was those forts in the Charleston harbor--and one in particular--that drew the attention of the nation, of both nations. For while almost every other piece of Union property fell without even a show of resistance, it was not to be so here in the city already coming to be called the Cradle of the Confederacy. How appropriate it is, with that irony so beloved of history, that the one city that symbolized and championed secession above all others should also be the place to test just how far Southerners would go with their experiment in revolution and how far Lincoln would go in attempting to prevent it.
In a way it was only accident that put federal troops in the Charleston forts for, unlike those others that were unmanned, Sumter and Moultrie were still under construction. Fort Moultrie, whose antecedents went back to the Revolution, housed the actual garrison, whose chief object was to oversee the construction of massive Fort Sumter out in the harbor. Built upon a man-made island of rubble--most of it from New England, incidentally--Sumter had been "in progress" for more than thirty years and was still unfinished. Though its fifty-foot high outer wall was complete, and most of the interior casemates stood ready to hold their seacoast defense cannon, few of those guns had yet been mounted, while many of the fort's interior appointments, including barracks, were temporary wooden structures.
Back in 1846, when Jefferson Davis was a Congressman from Mississippi, he had introduced a proposal that the garrisoning of such coastal defense forts be taken over from federal troops by local state militia. Nothing ever came of his suggestion, but if it had, there would have been no trouble in Charleston in 1861. Instead, there was a garrison of federal soldiers, all of 85 of them. It was not much, certainly no match for the dozens of southern militia units that gathered in Charleston immediately after South Carolina seceded in December. But as so often happened at great moments, the affairs of nations rested not upon the numbers of either side, but upon a single man.
Major Robert Anderson possessed the stuff of heroes. He had demonstrated that in the Mexican War, when he fought until felled by three bullets. If he was to be a hero now, many assumed it would be on the side of the revolutionaries, for he was a Kentuckian, a man of decidedly southern sympathies, and a slave owner who had married into an old Georgia family. More than that, his personal friendship with Jefferson Davis went back over 35 years to their West Point days together. Davis regarded him as "a true soldier and man of the finest sense of honor," and in the l850s, when Davis was secretary of war, he oversaw Anderson's promotion to his current rank.
Yet Anderson was truly a man caught in the middle, between his ties of blood and friendship to the South and the bonds of a soldier's loyalty to the Union and the flag he had served all of his professional life. Anderson did campaign in the Black Hawk War with his old friend Davis. But in that same war, he swore into volunteer service Abraham Lincoln as well. In December l860, with South Carolina seceding and both men about to become rival presidents, Anderson faced questions posed to few other American soldiers before or since.
From the first, he saw no other course than his duty as an officer, though he would try his mightiest to do that duty short of actual conflict, playing diplomat as well as soldier. Poor Anderson only took command of the Charleston forts in November 1860, with the situation deteriorating all around him. Failing to get any guidance from the comatose Buchanan administration, he had to act on his own. On December 23, just days after South Carolina left the Union, the first real instructions came from Secretary of War John B. Floyd, and they consisted of a thinly veiled suggestion that he should surrender rather than risk injury in any attack that would mean certain loss of the forts anyhow. Things were happening that Anderson knew nothing about, including a two-week old promise made by President Buchanan to South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens that federal authorities would do nothing in Charleston to alter the status quo. Status quo was the essence of Buchanan; Anderson was made of other stuff. He would act.
Shortly after arriving in Charleston, Anderson had determined that neither Moultrie nor the mainland installations, including Castle Pinckney set on an island close to the city, were defensible against attack. Only Fort Sumter, unfinished as it was, offered real protection to his garrison. Anderson reported this impression to Floyd soon after taking his command, and the secretary of war did authorize him to remove his troops to Sumter if threatened, though he never actually expected it to happen. Thus Floyd, Buchanan, and South Carolinians all met a healthy surprise on the morning of December 27, when daybreak revealed Moultrie and the other forts abandoned, their cannon spiked, stores either removed or destroyed, and Anderson and his men and their flag safely ensconced in Fort Sumter. When Governor Pickens demanded that Anderson return to Moultrie, citing President Buchanan's status quo promise, Anderson calmly replied, "I cannot and will not go back."
And now, forced to action by the major's decision, Buchanan even began to show some spine. When South Carolina emissaries demanded that Anderson return to Moultrie, the president told them no. "We are ruined if Anderson is recalled or if Sumter is given up," one of the president's men declared. Then Buchanan went even the next step by trying to send supplies to the garrison at Fort Sumter, but when the Star of the West approached the harbor on January 9, South Carolina guns opened fire on her and drove her away.
For a time, many expected this to start outright war, for each side charged the other with unwarranted aggression. But nothing came of it immediately. Buchanan tried once more to calm affairs and hold onto peace long enough for him to leave office, while to the south more states continued to secede, and South Carolina bided its time awaiting the organization of the new Confederate government before pressing the issue once more at Charleston. Inside Sumter itself, Anderson simply prayed to the Almighty "that He will be pleased to save us from the horrors of civil war."
It was a prayer unanswered. The new Confederate States of America was barely three weeks old when, on March 1, President Jefferson Davis sent Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard to take command of the forces in and around Charleston and to prepare its batteries for an attack upon Sumter if it should be ordered. In Washington, Abraham Lincoln relieved a tired Buchanan of his responsibilities and perhaps learned then for the first time the real nature of Anderson's plight. His supplies would soon run out and, unless revictualed, the garrison might face being starved into submission. In the fort itself, the men became increasingly restive as they awaited events. "We are in daily expectation of a commencement" of hostilities, wrote a private. "That they intend to bombard us is evident."
Lincoln's intent seemed less certain at first. Thanks to dissent within his own cabinet, his Secretary of State William H. Seward was giving Confederate representatives signals that Sumter would be abandoned, while Lincoln, unaware of Seward's doings, wavered back and forth on the issue before determining on March 30 to take steps to succor the garrison. He would send food only, but if the Confederates tried to prevent that, then troop ships would land reinforcements at Sumter as well.
Neither came to pass. In the face of mounting pressure in the South to drive Anderson away and seeing that Lincoln, not Seward, was making the decisions in Washington, Jefferson Davis finally decided that it was time for an ultimatum. Through Beauregard, the Confederate government on April 11 demanded that Anderson surrender.
When Major Anderson met with the emissaries from Beauregard, he gave them a flat refusal. But then he went on to ask if the batteries ringing the harbor would open fire upon him without warning. When told that they would not, Anderson thought he saw a glimmer of hope. He might yet avert the firing of a first shot that could lead the North and South into the abyss of civil war. "I shall await the first shot," he stated, "and if you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days." His meaning was clear: there was no need to open fire at all. Once his garrison was out of supplies, he could honorably evacuate the fort, the Confederates would have it, and the crisis in Charleston would have been settled without bloodshed.
Beauregard, an old friend to Anderson, was no less anxious to avert a conflict. Telegraphing to Davis in Montgomery that Anderson would soon be out of supplies, he was told by the president that he could hold his fire if the major would give a definite time at which he would evacuate. Just after midnight on April 12, Beauregard's aides again rowed out to the fort. Anderson stalled for time when they relayed Davis's conditions, then finally told them that he would leave the fort by noon on April 15.
Anderson knew that a relief expedition was on its way to Charleston. The date he gave to Beauregard would allow sufficient time for the supply ships to arrive, if they were coming. But this was not good enough for Beauregard, for the major's promise to evacuate was conditioned upon his not receiving new instructions from Washington or supplies in the interim. Beauregard's aides did the only thing they could do. Politely they informed Anderson that Charleston's batteries would open fire upon Sumter in one hour. Shaking each of the emissaries by the hand, Anderson bade them farewell, saying, "If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next."
In that, the last hour of American peace, American innocence, thousands of men in and around Fort Sumter pondered what was to come. Anderson and his officers wakened their men to prepare them. Soldiers in Charleston's batteries chafed with excitement now that the thing was going to start at last. Citizens stayed awake or tried to rest, according to their mood. Mary Chesnut, wife of one of Beauregard's emissaries, frankly confessed in her diary: "I do not pretend to go to sleep. How can I?" And oddly enough, among some of the hotheads who helped foment this crisis, there were sudden cold feet.
Leaving Fort Sumter, the Confederate aides first landed at Fort Johnson, due west of the fort. They ordered Captain George S. James to fire at the appointed time a signal shell from his battery that would commence the bombardment. Present was a leading secessionist from Virginia, Roger A. Pryor, who had fought long without success to get his state to secede. Arriving in Charleston just two days before, he promised a crowd of Carolinians: "I assure you that just as certain as tomorrow's sun will rise upon us, just so certain will Virginia be a member of the Southern Confederacy; and I will tell your governor what will put her in the Southern Confederacy in less than an hour by a Shrewsbury clock. Strike a blow!" Remembering his speech, Captain James offered Pryor the honor of firing the signal gun, of striking the first blow. The Virginian suddenly lost all his bluster and boast. "I could not fire the first gun of the war," he said. But Lieutenant Henry S. Farley could. At 4:30 on the morning of April 12, 1861, he pulled a lanyard that sent the signal shell rocketing into the air above Fort Sumter. Years later some would claim that it burst into a fiery palmetto, the symbol of South Carolina.
Thus, finally, after the generations of talk and debate, of bombast and posturing, of threat and withdrawal, Americans North and South had at last come to blows. Most were still baffled at how it could have happened, or why it was happening now rather than some other time. But the answer to their bewilderment lay all about them. Now at last, the stakes were great enough for the South to risk a bid for independence. Another generation might see more and more free states admitted, and the end of southern parity in Congress. The threat that scenario posed to southern life was too great for this crisis to pass away as had those before.
Equally important is the fact that only now was the nation ready for a civil war. Had the sections come to blows thirty or even twenty years earlier, there would have been no contest. In l840, with almost all small arms in the country still smoothbores; with transportation by rail still in its infancy, even in the North; with telegraphic communication still a relative novelty; and with almost no heavy industry at all in the South, the sections simply could not have fought a real war anywhere approaching the magnitude or nature of the one now commenced.
In 1861, however, just as the ideological polarization and hysteria in the old Union reached the point where brother could fire upon brother, so had the technological development of the country ensured that he could fire with deadly force and with a steady supply of weapons to equip the millions of men of military age north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. For, especially in the past decade, there had come to fruition a technological revolution begun decades before and called, for want of a better name, the American system. It was, in essence, the forerunner of modern mass production. Weapons and machinery of war that formerly had to be made slowly and by hand, were now made almost entirely by machine, by something approaching assembly line techniques. Further, advances in ballistics now gave, through rifling, a major advance in range and accuracy. Add to this the 30,000 miles of railroads that could now transport men and material almost anywhere east of the Mississippi, telegraph lines that brought instant communication wherever men chose to string the wires, a pool of manpower in both sections sufficient to field armies on a truly massive scale, a spirit of localism and independence that dated back to colonial times, and now political and social issues that simply did not admit of compromise, and Americans in 1861 had all the ingredients of that "irrepressible conflict" Seward spoke about.
Thus, consciously or unconsciously, North and South had waited until they had the capability to wage a real war before they started one. Both the democratic nature of the country and its people, with its advantages and its flaws, and the growth of the country as an industrial nation, were intimately linked in producing a distinctive war such as could not have been fought at any earlier time--or anywhere else on the globe.
On that part of the globe called Charleston, South Carolina, the signal shell from James's battery commenced a bombardment that lasted thirty-three hours and that could have but one outcome. Anderson kept his men under cover at first, deciding not to return fire until after dawn. When he offered Captain Abner Doubleday the honor of firing Sumter's first shot, the captain showed none of Pryor's hesitance. He was delighted. And so were the Confederates. They had feared at first that Sumter would not fire back, that their victory would be cheapened by being too easy. Shortage of powder and shot compelled Anderson to pace his fire, and in any case he offered only a show of resistance rather than a serious return fire. But whenever a gun from Sumter got off a shot, many of the Confederates manning the batteries that were trying to blast the fort from the water actually set aside their business and mounted their own works to cheer on the federals. Anyone looking on should have guessed right there that it was going to be a peculiar war.
The gunfire ceased that evening, only to resume the next day with renewed ferocity. Sumter's wooden buildings took flame. The fire from the Confederate--already they were called "rebel"--batteries was so great that Anderson could only risk working six of his own guns. The relief expedition sent by Lincoln was even then arriving off the harbor mouth, but with the firing going on, the ships could not safely come in to Sumter.
Then, just after noon on April 13, a shot cut down the federal flag. Thinking that Anderson had lowered it intentionally, an emissary rowed to the fort to propose surrender. After some confusion over who was authorized to receive the capitulation, Anderson agreed. He had done all he could do. The next day, with full honors to their flag, the valiant garrison of Fort Sumter paraded out of the fort after firing a fifty-gun salute. It was to have been a hundred guns, but an accident halfway through killed one soldier and mortally wounded another. After that, Anderson was anxious simply to get himself and his men aboard the ships that would take them home. Ironically, the first men to die in the Civil War were thus killed only after their fighting had stopped. It was, said newspaperman Horace Greeley, an almost bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.
The fall of Fort Sumter electrified Union and Confederacy alike. The question on every man's lips was, "What will happen next?" Some in the Confederacy thought that Sumter was an end of it. There would be no war. The Yankees, thus chastised, would let the southern states withdraw in peace. Armistead L. Burt of South Carolina foolishly boasted that he would drink personally every drop of blood shed as a result of secession, so confidant was he that Lincoln would not fight. Others were less sanguine. Secretary of State Robert Toombs of Georgia, once hot for war, reputedly prophesied that the taking of Sumter "will wantonly strike a hornet's nest." "Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death," he warned. "It is fatal."
The outpouring of emotion in the Union was instant--and staggering. "The heater is on fire, " wrote a Boston man on April 21. "I never knew what a popular excitement can be. . . . Nobody holds back. Civil war is freely accepted everywhere." A Philadelphian declared that "the assault upon Fort Sumter started us all to our feet, as one man. . . . We are to a great degree at present, and will shortly be throughout, an armed nation." And while young men of the North began to rush in martial euphoria to enlist and chastise the Rebels before the summer was out, a few thought they saw a long and hard road ahead. "Maybe it won't be such a picnic as some say it will," an Indiana farm boy wrote in his journal. Learning that his cousins in the South had already enlisted, he wondered "if I were [in] our army and they should meet me would they shoot me?" He could only conclude, "I suppose they would."
Indeed they would--and they did. And, as Lincoln would say, "the war came."
