Authors: Adam Goodheart
It was the face of a middle-aged gentleman, a bit thick in the jowls, with a black beard that seemed to bristle angrily in all directions and black eyes that flashed with righteous indignation. He was dressed not in a military uniform but in a frock coat and top hat. Gasping with exertion, cursing and swearing, he was now struggling unsuccessfully to pull himself over the sill with one arm, while his other hand awkwardly grasped a sword, a white handkerchief tied to its
point. The soldiers, crowding around, held the stranger at bay with their muskets. Was this some sort of rebel trick? The advance guard of an amphibious attack on the fort? No. The bizarre apparition was—though none of the men recognized him—the Honorable Mr. Louis T. Wigfall, lately United States senator from the now seceded state of Texas.
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Fort Sumter had not, in fact, surrendered: a stray shot from the rebels had toppled the flagstaff. Ex-Sergeant Hart and two comrades, at great risk to life and limb, had ventured forth to raise the banner again on a makeshift pole—for which valiant feat they would soon be celebrated by journalists, lithographers, and political orators throughout the Union. But during the brief silencing of the Confederate batteries, Senator Wigfall, smelling glory in the air, had
taken it upon himself to set forth from Moultrie in a small rowboat with the goal of personally securing Anderson’s formal capitulation. An unlucky Confederate private and three slaves, whom he had dragooned into service at the oars, accompanied him. By the time Moultrie’s commanding officers noticed
what Wigfall was up to and began yelling for him to stop, the boat was already out of earshot. They fired a warning shot across his bow, but still the
senator—much to the consternation of his oarsmen—would not turn back. By the time they reached the middle of the channel, the Confederate batteries around the harbor had begun opening fire once more, as had Anderson’s cannons, and the colonel in charge at Moultrie ordered his gunners to sink that “damned politician.”
The politician in question, despite his extensive youthful experience with dueling pistols, found incoming artillery rounds a bit harder to face. Wigfall tied his handkerchief to his sword and stood up in the bow, hoping the gunners would honor his makeshift flag of truce, but managing only to nearly swamp the boat. With shots splashing around them, he and his crew somehow made it safely to the shore, with Sumter under a full-on Confederate barrage. Showers of bricks
fell from above as the portly senator clambered over rocks and debris toward the embrasures, sword and handkerchief in hand. No one in the fort had noticed his boat coming.
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“We stubbornly refused him admittance for a while,” wrote Thompson, “but he begged so hard, exhibited the flag he carried and even surrendered his sword”—handing it to Thompson—“that at last we helped him in.” Now, to the artillerymen’s astonishment, the bearded gentleman ordered them to stop firing, a command that they naturally ignored.
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At last someone called for Major Anderson, who tried to mask his own surprise as he stepped into the casemate and saw the stranger. “To what am I indebted for this visit?” he asked dryly.
“I am Colonel Wigfall, of General Beauregard’s staff,” the ex-senator rasped in as official a voice as he could muster. “For God’s sake, Major, let this thing stop. There has been enough bloodshed already.” He had come, he said, to offer terms of surrender. Under the present circumstances, in fact, the shell-shocked envoy appeared ready to accept any terms whatsoever that would make the shooting go away.
But Wigfall’s little speech, plain enough on its face, was a bit specious at best. For one thing, the “bloodshed” so far consisted of a single Confederate horse. More important, although implying that he came on Beauregard’s authority, Wigfall had not even seen the Confederate commander in several days, much less received any instructions from him. The men at Sumter could not have known this, of course.
Anderson pointed out that there had been no bloodshed, at least on his own side—“and besides, your batteries are still firing at me.”
“I’ll soon stop that,” Wigfall replied briskly. He turned to Thompson, who held the sword and handkerchief under one arm, pointed to the embrasure, and told the astonished private, “Wave that out there.”
“Wave it yourself,” Thompson retorted in his thick brogue, handing the Confederate his sword back.
Wigfall leapt boldly into the opening, somehow believing that the gunners half a mile away would glimpse his handkerchief through the smoke and recognize it as a flag of truce. Presently a shot from Moultrie slammed into the nearby wall, disabusing him swiftly of this notion.
“If you desire that to be seen,” Anderson said gently, “you had better send it to the parapet.”
Several minutes later, Charlestonians on their distant rooftops spotted something waving on a pole above Sumter’s bomb-scarred ramparts, alongside the Stars and Stripes. This was not Senator Wigfall’s handkerchief but a full-size white flag. It signaled a cease-fire while Major Anderson negotiated—“or rather dictated,” as Thompson later said—his terms of surrender.
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“N
OTHING OF MILITARY IMPORTANCE
has reached me today,” scribbled Winfield Scott in a note to the president that evening, more or less precisely as Fort Sumter was falling into Confederate hands. “Except,” the general added, “thro’ the newspaper.”
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If General Scott had been known for his drolleries, this might have come off as a rather clever one. (He was not, so it didn’t.) For in fact, the headlines of every single paper throughout the Union blazed with the most astonishing military news since Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Editors dug deep in their bins of lead type for the largest fonts available, nor did they stint on exclamation points. The
Milwaukee Sentinel
’s front page
was typical:
“Hostilities Commenced
!
FORT SUMTER BOMBARDED
!
The Rebels Strike the First Blow
!
MOULTRIE OPENS ON MAJ. ANDERSON
!
SEVEN OF THEIR BATTERIES FOLLOW
!
Prompt Response from Sumter!”
(And so on, through nine more lines of boldface and italic type and another five exclamation points.)
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It had taken almost an entire day for most Americans to learn about the first shots at Sumter, since telegraphic communication between North and South had been erratic since secession. On the night of Friday the 12th,
Walt Whitman went to the
opera in New York. The Fourteenth Street Academy of Music was presenting Verdi’s latest,
Un ballo in maschera,
which had been censored in Europe
for its undertones of liberal nationalism but was now touring the United States to great
acclaim. After the show, the poet was strolling back toward Brooklyn when he heard the shrill cries of newsboys ahead—a rare sound indeed at midnight. The lads came tearing down Broadway, “rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual,” singing out “Extry! Got the bombardment of
Fort Sumter
!!!” Soon every gaslight on the
street had its own little huddle of New Yorkers poring over dispatches from Charleston.
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The news, Whitman would later remember, “ran through the Land, as if by electric nerves.” Many people didn’t believe it at first: surely, they said, this was rebel propaganda. Perhaps someone had tampered with the telegraph lines. Contradictory reports began coming in: Major Anderson had shelled downtown Charleston, incinerating the city and sending thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives. No, he had gone over to the Confederate side, was
blowing up his fort piece by piece, and planned to escape by sea in a small boat. Captain Doubleday, resisting surrender, had been clapped in irons by Anderson and then promptly went insane. And perhaps most prevalent: Sumter had been reinforced by Fox’s fleet. (Saturday night’s performance at the
Academy of Music was interrupted during Act 4, when the house manager stepped onstage to announce this last piece of splendid news,
inspiring the soprano to launch immediately into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”)
In any event, wrote the skeptical George Templeton Strong, no man of sense could believe that the rebels “have been so foolish and thoughtless as to take the initiative in civil war.”
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But when later reports confirmed the initial headlines, disbelief gave way to shock. Throughout the country—even in the heart of busy Manhattan, even on Wall Street—business came to a halt as men and women left their shops and offices to crowd into barrooms, hotel lobbies, and public squares, anywhere that they might hear the very latest facts and rumors. Crowds formed around newsstands, too, pushing and shoving to press pennies upon the beleaguered
vendors. From
Fort Kearny in the
Nebraska Territory—the westernmost point of the telegraph lines—a
Pony Express rider galloped off toward California with the news. In Washington, when a man in the lobby of the Willard ventured to express his sympathy with the rebels, police had to come break up the ensuing fracas.
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Perhaps the calmest place in the country was, oddly enough, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Willard.
“There was little variation in the business of the Executive Mansion on that eventful Saturday,” Hay and Nicolay would remember. The president signed official papers, read his mail, and met patiently with
the usual parade of dubiously qualified patronage seekers, who insisted on a hearing even at this moment of historic crisis. When a delegation of congressmen came bustling into Lincoln’s office, pressing him for his reaction to
the momentous news, he replied dryly, “I do not like it,” and changed the subject. The only visitors who left the
White House with something more substantial were three Virginians, members of the statewide convention considering
secession. He reassured them that he would hold fast to the policy of nonaggression promised in his inaugural address. But, he now added almost matter-of-factly, “in
every event, I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” This was, as the Virginians would soon learn, an all-important clarification.
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Although there is no record of exactly when or how Lincoln got the news of Sumter’s surrender, initial reports probably reached him Saturday evening, not many hours after the event itself. Incredibly, the White House and War Department had no official intelligence or communications system of any kind, but at least two citizens in the South—one of them a prominent Charleston secessionist, the other an obscure Savannah accountant—were considerate
enough to send Lincoln telegrams that night.
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Just six months earlier, very few Americans had ever even heard of Fort Sumter. But now the loss of this two-acre island—the lowering of one flag and the raising of another over a useless piece of federal real estate—was suddenly a national calamity. For many, it was also a summons to vengeance. In Philadelphia, one block from Independence Hall, a mob of young men wrecked the offices of a small pro-Southern newspaper imprudently named
The Palmetto
Flag,
then marched up Market Street waving American flags and brandishing nooses, on the hunt for other secessionists. In a bucolic little Indiana village, schoolchildren hanged Jeff Davis in effigy.
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For others, though, that eventful weekend inspired more complicated thoughts and feelings.
Saturday afternoon found James Garfield sitting alone in the nearly deserted chamber of the Ohio senate. The legislators had adjourned early; rain beat monotonously against the windows; and only a small knot of men remained on the other side of the room, discussing the news and poring over a large map of Charleston Harbor. The militia bill that Garfield had championed vainly all winter had swept to passage immediately at the first word of the attack. But he took no
pleasure in this belated victory. Struggling privately with a tangle of emotions—anxiety, excitement, melancholy, anger, mental exhaustion—Garfield began a letter to his old friend
Harry Rhodes.
He felt almost as if he could see the battle at Sumter happening before his own eyes, he said. It enraged him to think of how his government had left Major Anderson on the island “with his hands tied” for three
months while the rebels armed for the attack—so that now “he will almost certainly surrender to the traitors or perish.” Here he set the letter down, unable to continue. By the time he picked it up again the next morning, word had come that Anderson had, indeed, struck his colors. Yet Garfield’s spirits had lifted. He and
Jacob Cox, his roommate and fellow senator, had just been to see the governor—who,
flatteringly, had wished to confer with the two young men about Ohio’s response to the crisis. With Sumter still burning, ruined, on its far-off island, Garfield felt a sudden rush of clarity about the future, which Rhodes doubtless recognized:
The war has now fully begun. I am glad we are defeated at Sumpter. It will rouse the people. I can see no possible end to the war, till the South is subjugated. I hope we will never stop short of complete subjugation. Better to lose a million men in battle than allow the government to be overthrown. The war will soon assume the shape of Slavery & Freedom—the world will so understand it—& I believe the final outcome will redound to
the good of humanity.
He and Cox, he added, had been talking not just about “the prospects of the country [but] the future of our own lives.” They had decided, Garfield reported, to leave politics behind. They would go into the army.
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In Boston, too, many were thinking about Slavery & Freedom. On Sunday afternoon, twelve-year-old
Franky Garrison sprinted home from the Common, where he had just heard about Anderson’s surrender, to tell his father the news. A few days later, when he helped proofread the galleys of that week’s
Liberator,
the boy must have realized what a sea change was occurring. “The North United at Last,”
one headline ran. For thirty years, the elder Garrison had fought not just to defeat Southern slaveholders but also to win over the divided heart of his own region. He had hung the star-spangled banner upside down, as an emblem of the despicable Constitution. But now Franky and his father watched with pride as a huge American flag was raised right in front of the
Liberator
office, on a staff 140 feet tall. The more that slave drivers trampled on that banner, Garrison
confessed, the handsomer it seemed. His comrade Wendell Phillips went even further. A week after Anderson’s surrender, he stood amid red, white, and blue bunting
before a cheering crowd of Boston abolitionists. “For the first time in my anti-slavery life,” he told them, “I speak beneath the stars and stripes.… To-day the slave asks God for a sight of this banner, and counts it the pledge of his redemption.”
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