1861 (32 page)

Indeed, the response to Sumter seemed to manifest itself, among Northerners of every political and cultural hue, as a kind of flag mania. Along the thoroughfares of major cities, each shop and office “successively ran up its colors like a fleet of ships on the eve of the action.” On village greens and town squares—places where it had never previously occurred to anyone that the national emblem belonged—citizens gathered for solemn ceremonies
around hastily erected poles. (And from that day to this, there would scarcely be a single American hamlet, no matter how tiny, that did
not
display the Stars and Stripes in its most conspicuous available spot.) Artists and intellectuals were swept up in the moment as well. The painter
Frederic Church, previously known for producing landscapes of exquisite delicacy, now daubed a canvas with a garish piece of patriotic kitsch: a sunrise
scene in which the clouds formed red and white stripes, with a square patch of stars twinkling against blue sky in the upper left. (This was quickly transformed into a best-selling lithograph.)
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For a century and a half, historians have struggled to explain exactly why the attack at Charleston struck such a transformative chord. Even
Bruce Catton, one of the Civil War’s greatest twentieth-century chroniclers, was left scratching his head: “In the strangely revealing light of the exploding shell,” he wrote, Americans “saw something that was to carry them through four years of war. It is hard to say
just what it was, for no one bothered to be explicit about it and time has dimmed it anyway.” George Bancroft, America’s most revered historian in the 1860s, did try to be explicit, and came up with a tortured explanation involving navigation rights on the Chesapeake and Mississippi. But in any case, he remembered of that April, “I witnessed the sublimest spectacle I ever saw.”
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Perhaps there was an explanatory power in the flags themselves. Two weeks after Sumter’s surrender,
Henry Ward Beecher gave a sermon at his Brooklyn church to bless the colors that two local volunteer companies were carrying with them to war. With characteristic theatricality, the great preacher eulogized the flag in Christlike terms:

Whitman expressed the same idea in plainer language—although the simple words masked deeper complexities—when he wrote: “The negro was not the chief thing: the chief thing was to stick together.”

The attack on Sumter forced Americans everywhere to pick sides: to stand either with the flag or against it—and overwhelmingly, perhaps for a multitude of individual reasons, Northerners chose to stand with it. And that expression of national unity, in turn, became the strongest possible argument for the
Union itself: for the idea that the flag could shelter beneath its folds Americans of many opinions and temperaments, and that
disagreement need not mean
disunion. The pure wordless symbolism of a piece of cloth could represent both the deepest traditions of American radicalism and those of American conservatism. For people like Garrison and Phillips, it had become a pledge to stand firm against the slave power and uphold what they saw as the purest distillation of America’s commitment to liberty, as embodied in the Declaration. To more orthodox minds, it was a
summons to defend the nation and the Constitution.

Even Emerson, the great apostle of
individualism, found himself beholding with astonished admiration the “whirlwind of patriotism, not believed to exist, but now magnetizing all discordant masses under its terrific unity.” He was then in the midst of a lecture series in Boston on the relationship between “Life” and “Literature.” Amid his abstract ruminations, he had taken note of the national
crisis; a few days before Sumter he had spoken of “the facility with which a great political fabric can be broken.” But the following week, he threw aside his prepared text and spoke instead from a sheaf of hastily scribbled notes. The sage went so far as to admit he had been wrong:

Ironically, the Confederates’ attack on, and swift victory at, Fort Sumter turned out to be their worst strategic blunder of the war, a blunder, indeed, that may have cost the South its independence. It is difficult to see what the rebels would have lost if they had allowed Major Anderson and his tiny force to be provisioned and remain indefinitely. Indeed, they could have couched their forbearance as a humanitarian gesture, a token of their peaceful intentions,
that might have won them allies not just in the North but also—all-importantly—among the nations of Europe. Certainly leaving Sumter alone would have bought them more time: time to more fully organize and equip the South’s armies; time to establish all the ordinary apparatus—a postal service, a stable national currency, a judicial system—that serve to make government a stable fact rather than a speculative figment. Both to its own citizens and to
the rest of the world, the Confederate States of America might have come to seem like a fait accompli.
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Instead, Davis, his cabinet, and his generals had only a perfunctory discussion before deciding to shell the fort.

As Lincoln told a confidant: “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”

To be sure, some Americans in the North continued decrying what they saw as a misbegotten war against slavery. “A servile insurrection and the wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists,” wrote the editor of one New York paper in mid-April. “The Administration, egged on by the halloo of
the Black Republican journals of this city, has sent on its mercenary forces to pick a
quarrel and initiate the work of devastation and ruin.”
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A few still held out hope for a bloodless reunion. One pro-Union meeting in New York began with extravagant toasts, not to Anderson or Lincoln but to
John J. Crittenden. When the venerable senator had announced his retirement when Congress adjourned in March, he made clear to his friends that he wished never to see Washington again. He then hurried home, exhausted and demoralized, to his
Kentucky
farm. Just after the fall of Sumter, however, with his state teetering on the brink of secession, the old politician took to the stump once more, begging his fellow Kentuckians to steer a neutral course: remain loyal to their country but take up arms against neither North nor South. The state did not secede. In the coming months, however, Crittenden would see three of his own sons march off to war: two to fight for the Union, one for the Confederacy.
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A few abolitionists, too, could not bring themselves to join in the war fever. The farthest that
Lydia Maria Child could go was to hope that someday the Stars and Stripes might be worthy of the adoration it was receiving. “Meanwhile,” she wrote to a friend, “I wait to see how the United States will deport itself. When it treats the colored people with justice and humanity, I will mount its flag in my great
elm-tree, and I will thank you to present me with a flag for a breast-pin; but until then, I would as soon wear the rattlesnake upon my bosom as the eagle.”
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Child was not the only one to speculate on what war might mean for the slaves. On the morning he heard about Sumter’s fall, William Russell, the
London Times
’ urbane correspondent, was already in Baltimore on his way to catch a steamer bound for Charleston. Stopping for a quick shave, he asked the black barber what he made of the news. “Well, sare,” the man replied, “ ’spose colored men will be as good as white
men.”
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Russell later offered this tidbit to his readers in a tone of mildly sympathetic amusement. The poor deluded Negro!

S
HORTLY AFTER
A
NDERSON’S SURRENDER
to the intrepid Wigfall, General Beauregard’s authorized aides arrived at the fort. In the end, they decided to honor the agreement that the major and the ex-senator had reached. Only Doubleday seemed irked that the battle was over: he continued to believe that it might have ended differently if his commander had worried less about avoiding bloodshed and more
about defeating the enemy, maybe by trying to shell Charleston itself. Anderson, for his part, was quick to assure the Confederate envoys that he had always aimed his cannons at fortifications rather than at men, and when told that none of the secessionists had been wounded by Sumter’s fire, he lifted up his hands and exclaimed, “Thank God for that!” (Doubleday listened, fuming: “As the object of our fighting was to do as much damage
as possible, I could see no propriety in thanking Heaven for the small amount of injury we had inflicted.”)
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The only term of surrender at which the Confederates initially balked was Anderson’s request to salute his flag a final time before lowering it. But in the end they allowed him to do so.

On Sunday afternoon—a day of splendid sunshine—the tattered national ensign rose again on its repaired flagpole and unfurled into a strong breeze. Anderson was determined to honor it with no fewer than a hundred cannon blasts. This was not to be. His salute, like the Union, was cloven in half. With the fiftieth shot came disaster and a terrible omen: a gun crew, exhausted by the recent ordeal, reloaded its weapon too hastily, neglecting to cool the muzzle
with a thorough sponging before ramming in the powder. In the ensuing explosion, one soldier—a young Irish immigrant named
Daniel Hough, well liked among the men of the garrison—was killed almost instantly, his body torn apart. Several others were badly wounded.

But there was no time to mourn the dead or care for the injured. Daniel Hough’s remains were left behind to be buried by the enemy, as so many other men’s would be in the years ahead. Still in shock, his comrades formed ranks behind Captain Doubleday and marched through Sumter’s main gate toward a waiting transport. Behind them they could hear wild cheering as the Stars and Stripes came down and a Confederate banner went up.

Early the next day—Monday, April 15—the U.S. steamer
Baltic,
with Major Anderson and all his men aboard, cleared the bar of Charleston Harbor and set out into open water.
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—H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
,
“The Conflict of Convictions” (1860–61)

Rally at Union Square, New York, April 20, 1861 (
photo credit 5.1
)

I
T WAS A DAY UNLIKE ANY
the city had known before. Half a million people, or so the newspapers would report, crowded the streets between Battery Park and Fourteenth Street. If you were there among them that day, the thing that you would never forget—not even if you lived to see the next century—was the flags. The Stars and Stripes flew above the doors of department stores and town houses, from Bowery taverns and from the spire
of Trinity Church, while Broadway, the
New York Herald
reported, “was almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery.”
P. T. Barnum, not to be outdone, especially when he sensed an opportunity for attention, had strung an entire panoply of oversize banners across the thoroughfare. The national ensign even fluttered, in miniature, on the heads of the horses straining to pull overloaded omnibuses through the throngs on Fifth Avenue. The
one flag that everyone wanted to see
—needed
to see—was in Union Square itself, the unattainable point toward which all the shoving and sweating and jostling bodies strove. No fewer than five separate speakers’ platforms had been hastily erected there, and every so often, above the ceaseless din, you could catch a phrase or two:
“that handful of loyal men … their gallant commander … the honor of their
country …”