Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (26 page)

The Crittenden Compromise actually called for not one but a series of constitutional amendments that guaranteed the following: the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ would be revived and slavery would be forbidden in any state or territory north of the line and protected anywhere to the south; slavery in the District of Columbia was to be protected from congressional regulation; Congress would be prohibited from interfering in the interstate slave trade; and Congress would compensate any slave owner whose runaways were sheltered by local Northern courts or anti-slavery measures.

Crittenden seriously believed that his compromise could win popular support, and he even urged Congress to submit it to a national referendum. Lincoln, who refused to believe that the secession threats were finally serious, would have none of it. “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the
extension
of slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 11. “The instant you do, they have us under again. … The tug has to come & better now than later.” At Lincoln’s cue, the Republicans in Congress gagged on Crittenden’s guarantees for the extension of slavery into the territories, and on January 16 they successfully killed Crittenden’s compromise on the floor of the Senate by a narrow margin, just five votes.
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In all fairness to Buchanan, the compromise plan had not necessarily been a bad idea in political terms, and in February a mostly Democratic “peace convention,” with delegates from twenty states and chaired by no one less than ex-president John Tyler, attempted to revive the Crittenden proposals. But Buchanan had lost the will and the political force that had enabled him to carry the Lecompton constitution through an unwilling Congress in 1858, and so his efforts at compromise, sincere but halfhearted, died wordlessly on his own goal line. Republican intransigence was hardly Buchanan’s only problem. Buchanan might have found secession a little more tolerable, or at least a little more ignorable, if the secessionists had not themselves kept pushing on what was, for Buchanan, a particularly touchy question of honor: the disposition of federal property in the seceding states. “If a separation had been sought by the slave-holding States… through peaceful means alone, it might have been ultimately conceded by the Northern States,” wrote Buchanan’s secretary of the Treasury, John Dix.
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The United States government owned and operated a mint in New Orleans, a network of post offices throughout the South, two major arsenals full of weapons, several storage arsenals in major cities, and nine forts—and the secessionists were not willing to leave them alone. Since the employees of the mint, the post offices, and the arsenals were both civilians and compliant Southerners, the seceding states
simply appropriated the facilities for their own use before Buchanan or anyone else could have anything to say in the matter. The forts, however, were a different matter altogether. As U.S. military installations, they were garrisoned and commanded by the United States Army. Unless the seceders were exceptionally bold (as at Fort Pulaski) or the federal officers exceptionally unreliable, the seceders would hesitate to risk an armed confrontation with the federal government, and so the forts were left alone. In leaving them alone, the seceders only created trouble for themselves, since the continued presence of the federal government’s authority in these forts only festered in the minds of the secessionists, not to mention discrediting the authority of the movement in the eyes of the other slave states, who still remained undecided about secession. And none of those forts produced more irritation than the three forts that sat quietly brooding over the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

Only one of the Charleston forts, Fort Moultrie, was seriously occupied by the two artillery companies that constituted Charleston’s federal garrison. Of the other two, Castle Pinckney was an obsolete relic of the eighteenth century, and Fort Sumter was an incomplete brick pentagon sitting on a man-made island of granite rubble beside the main ship channel. Under pressure from the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan probably would have been willing to negotiate with South Carolina over the future of the forts; presumably to pave the way for those negotiations, the secretary of war, a pro-secession Virginian named John B. Floyd, sent the Charleston garrison a slaveholding Kentucky major of artillery, Robert Anderson, as its new commander in November 1860. Anderson’s orders were to avoid provocations, carry out military business as usual, and make no changes in his dispositions unless he felt his garrison was actually threatened in some way. That, and a little time, would ensure that the Charleston forts could be turned over, either to Lincoln so that Buchanan could retire in peace, or to the South Carolinians without a messy confrontation.

Anderson was a Southerner, but he was also a career regular army officer whose first loyalty was to the honor of the United States. Anderson first surveyed the decaying ramparts of Fort Moultrie, then sized up the growing numbers of armed South Carolina militia keeping watch over Fort Moultrie. Six days after South Carolina uproariously adopted its secession ordinance, Anderson exercised the discretion granted him by his orders and changed his dispositions. Under cover of night, he evacuated his two companies from Moultrie and rowed them over to Sumter, where no one in Charleston had a hope of laying hands on them. The next morning Anderson raised his flag “to the top of the staff, the band broke out with the national air of ‘Hail Columbia,’ and loud and exultant cheers, repeated again and again, were given by the officers, soldiers, and workmen.”
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An “outrageous breach of faith” was how the
Charleston Mercury
characterized Anderson’s move. The North, by contrast, hailed Anderson as a hero, a patriot who at
last had the courage to defy the secession bluster. President Buchanan was angered by Anderson’s move and was inclined to order Anderson back to Moultrie. But when it appeared that Northern public opinion was solidly behind Anderson, Buchanan changed his mind and attempted to persuade the South Carolinians to accept Anderson’s occupation of Fort Sumter as a legitimate exercise of federal authority. The South Carolina government, however, stopped its ears. Nothing now would satisfy their injured pride but the unconditional surrender of Sumter, and on January 9, 1861, when the steamer
Star of the West
(“a mere transport, utterly unfitted to contend with shore batteries”) entered Charleston harbor with provisions and reinforcements for Sumter, South Carolina militia opened fire on it with several cannon and forced the ship to withdraw. Only Anderson’s restraint in refusing to open fire himself on the South Carolinians kept civil war from breaking out at that moment.
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From that time onward, Anderson took nothing further for granted. His eighty-five-man force of soldiers, bandsmen, and civilian workers mounted a total of sixty powerful cannon inside the fort, and he brought the uncompleted fort as close to war readiness as possible.

Anderson’s refusal to take the firing on the
Star of the West
as a signal for him to bombard the city of Charleston also made it possible for Buchanan to escape from office without further incident. Lincoln formally assumed office from Buchanan on March 4, 1861, and in his inaugural address he made it as clear as he could that he had no intention of backing down in his support of Major Anderson. However, as Anderson himself informed Lincoln in a dispatch received on the evening of the inaugural, the real question was not whether the government would support Anderson but whether Anderson could support himself. When the new Confederate States government had officially taken over control of the Charleston harbor defenses on March 1, it had immediately cut Sumter off from all mail and local food supplies and begun erecting ominous batteries of cannon around the harbor perimeter. In his dispatch, Anderson warned the new president that he had only enough food for six weeks more in the fort, and at the end of that time he would be compelled to surrender.
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What did Lincoln propose to do?

For three weeks Lincoln weighed the alternatives before him. On one hand, he could attempt to resupply Sumter, but with the example of the
Star of the West
before him, he knew that any such attempt would provoke a shooting match, which he would be held responsible for starting—contrary to all of his assurances to the slave states over the past three months, and in full confirmation of all the wild accusations about his aggressive designs on the South. That, in turn, could easily cause not only
a full-fledged civil war but also a fresh round of secessions, this time in the upper South. On the other hand, Lincoln could order Sumter evacuated; in that event, he knew, the credibility of his presidency and the Republican administration would be in pieces before either had scarcely begun.

On March 29, after polling his cabinet for the second time on the question, Lincoln decided. He ordered a supply flotilla prepared and sent to Charleston, then sat back to await the unpleasant outcome. If the flotilla succeeded in resupplying Sumter, then federal authority in South Carolina had been preserved, and Charleston could do little short of war to change it; if it failed, the failure would be due to Charleston’s decision to open fire, and the onus of beginning a civil war would lie on their heads. Clearly, Lincoln was not trying to provoke war; but it was also true that either way, Charleston lost and Lincoln won, and years afterward people would become convinced that Lincoln had rigged it all deliberately to have a civil war begin that way.
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As it turned out, the Confederates did not wait for the flotilla to arrive. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate cabinet in Montgomery were notified of Lincoln’s resupply mission on April 10, and the next day they ordered the Confederate commander in Charleston—a dashing French Louisianan named Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—to demand Anderson’s surrender, or else proceed to level the fort.
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Anderson rejected Beauregard’s demand, and at 4:30 am on April 12, 1861, the Confederate batteries ringing Charleston harbor opened fire on Anderson’s pitiful little garrison. For thirty-four hours Anderson’s two companies fought back until their ammunition was exhausted and the interior of the fort was hopelessly ablaze. On April 14 Anderson lowered his flag, and marched out of the battered fort, remarkably without having lost a single man of his garrison during the bombardment.

That night, the observatory at Harvard College noted the advent of an enormous comet. In the estimate of the venerable British astronomer Sir John Herschel, it “exceeded in brilliancy all other comets that he had ever seen,” and until it passed its perihelion and faded from view in December, it was “the most brilliant that has appeared for centuries, and one of the most remarkable on record.” Of course, cautioned a writer for the
Danville Quarterly Review
, people no longer regarded comets “as omens of impending evil, or messengers of an angry Deity.” Looking back from the vantage point of the next four years, the
Review
might not have felt so confident.
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O
n the “most exquisite morning” of April 15, 1861, Sarah Butler Wister rose early to take a bundle of letters to the post office near her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown. To her annoyance, she found that their newspaper had been stolen from their doorstep. But soon she and her husband, Dr. Owen Jones Wister, found that they needed no newspapers to learn what was happening in the world. “All the world was awake & alive with the news that Ft. Sumter has surrendered,” she confided to her diary.
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The news of the fall of Fort Sumter set off a string of contradictory emotions in Sarah Butler Wister. Her father was Pierce Butler, a Georgia planter and Democratic politician, and the mail that morning contained a letter from her father describing a guided tour he had received of the Charleston harbor batteries by “Gen. Beauregard & other officers.” Her mother, however, was the celebrated English Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble, who had married Pierce Butler in 1834 and lived to regret it. The life Kemble led on the Butler plantation was miserable beyond description, and the lot of the Butler family slaves was even more miserable. Divorcing Butler, Kemble returned to England and the stage in 1845, and would later publish a
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation
, which painted slavery in its vilest colors. Sarah Butler had been born in 1835 in Philadelphia (Pierce Butler had inherited land in both Philadelphia and Georgia from the two very different sides of
his family) and married Owen Jones Wister there in 1859. Her opinions on slavery flowed all in her mother’s direction.

Both the weather and the news turned darker through the day. While “the latter part of the day was gloomy and forbidding,” she heard rumors of “thousands… furious at the news of the surrender,” marching in the streets of Philadelphia “& swearing revenge on all disunionists or disaffected.” Robert Tyler, the son of former president John Tyler, “literally fled before them,” and the crowd “visited the houses, stores & offices of” Southerners who had made themselves “especially odious in the last few days.” The mob was in the streets again the next day (“oh how thankful I am for Father’s absence”) and had to be pacified by speeches and threats from Mayor Alexander Henry. Not that Sarah Wister really minded them: “They were the most moderate, mannerly mob ever heard of.” At the same time, though, she saw in their faces (when she went out to buy “radishes in the market”) that “they were in the utmost state of excitement & the least thing would have fired them, & then riots must have followed.” Mixed snow and rain fell the next day, but “flags large & small flaunt from every building, the dry-goods shops have red, white & blue materials draped together in their windows, in the ribbon stores the national colors hang in long streamers, and even the book sellers place the red, white, and blue bindings together.”