America Aflame (35 page)

Another factor aside from his constitutional scruples constrained Lincoln's ability to placate southerners. He did not wish to limit his policy options with respect to the status of federal property in the seceded states. Lincoln understood that this was one issue he would have to address immediately.

In November 1860, President Buchanan had ordered Major Robert Anderson to take command of Fort Moultrie, one of three federal fortifications surrounding Charleston Harbor; aside from Fort Pickens at Pensacola, Florida, these were the only remaining major federal installations not yet in the hands of the Confederate government. Anderson, a Kentuckian, a slaveholder, and a Democrat, received a promise from Buchanan that his role in Charleston was as a caretaker, not as a provocateur. Whatever Anderson's political leanings, he was a career military officer and believed that “neither slavery nor any thing else should stand in the way of the preservation of the Union.” Arriving at Moultrie, he was appalled by the weakness of the fort's position and fortifications. He requested more troops, arguing that Moultrie's vulnerability invited a takeover by Confederate authorities. Buchanan denied the request. Seeing no alternative, Anderson, on the night of December 26, spiked Moultrie's guns and stole away to the better-fortified though unfinished Fort Sumter, an installation that stood astride the harbor with a strategic view of the mainland. Major Anderson had salvaged the flag that had flown over Moultrie, and on December 27 he raised it over Fort Sumter to the accompaniment of an army band playing “Hail, Columbia.” The soldiers cheered lustily for their banner, and, a reporter noted, “if South Carolina had at that moment attacked the fort, there would have been no hesitation on the part of any man within it about defending that flag.”
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Charlestonians were furious. They considered Major Anderson's movement from Moultrie to Sumter a provocation and immediately took possession of Moultrie and surrounded Sumter with a battery of guns. When, on January 9, President Buchanan dispatched a supply ship, the
Star of the West
, to restock Major Anderson's declining provisions at the fort, the batteries opened fire, forcing the supply vessel to retreat. On February 28, Major Anderson wrote to President Buchanan that he had only six weeks' provisions remaining. Outgoing secretary of war Joseph Holt hand-delivered Major Anderson's letter to President Lincoln the day after his inauguration. The problem was now Lincoln's.

The issue was simple, though the choices were difficult: do not provision Fort Sumter and the garrison would fall to the Confederate government; provision the fort and risk a military confrontation, as the Confederate authorities would perceive such action as an act of war. Lincoln had vowed in his inaugural address to uphold the Constitution and to “protect and defend” the country's interests; yet he had also promised that he would not make any aggressive movements against the South.

The new president was determined to keep the flag flying in Charleston Harbor. He authorized a former naval officer, Gustavus Vasa Fox, to organize a relief expedition to Fort Sumter but did not order its dispatch. Commanding General of the Army Winfield Scott advised Lincoln to order Major Anderson to withdraw from Fort Sumter. Lincoln weighed this advice, his concern about how the states of the Upper South would react, and his own conflicting emotions as March turned into April. The northern press fumed at the president, contrasting the quiet heroism of Anderson and the resolve of the Confederate government with Lincoln's indecision. The
New York Times
, a Republican newspaper, in a testy editorial on April 3, under the heading of “Wanted—A Policy!” observed that the Confederate government was conducting itself with a “degree of vigor, intelligence, and success” absent in Washington, D.C.
49

Surrendering Fort Sumter was never an option for Lincoln, given his constitutional responsibilities. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recalled his conversation with the president as he contemplated sending the Fox relief expedition to Charleston. Lincoln “could not consistently with his conviction of his duty, and with the policy he had enunciated in his inaugural, order the evacuation of Sumter, and it would be inhuman on his part to permit the heroic garrison to be starved into a surrender without an attempt to relieve it.”
50

Provisioning Major Anderson would require the utmost diplomacy with an administration the president did not formally recognize. Lincoln dispatched a messenger to Charleston on April 6 notifying Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina that “an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumpter [
sic
] with provisions only, and that, if such an attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack on the Fort.”
51

Mary Boykin Chesnut, a witty, bright, and dedicated diarist, had a front-row seat at the proceedings. She and her husband, James, a Confederate senator, owned a home in Charleston near the Battery, where residents strolled in the early evening to escape the oppressive heat further inland. The Battery looked out onto Charleston Harbor and the drama that unfolded between land and sea. In early April, as a sense of impending confrontation gripped the city, Mary recorded the bellicose declarations of citizens thirsting for a confrontation. Everyone, it seemed, deemed war inevitable. One of her closest friends related that “the only feeling she had about the War was pity for those who could not get here.”
52

Governor Pickens forwarded Lincoln's message on April 8 to General P. G. T. Beauregard, commanding general of Confederate forces in Charleston, who, in turn, telegraphed President Davis in Montgomery for instructions. Beauregard received orders on April 10 to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter and to attack the federal garrison there if Major Anderson refused to surrender. Major Anderson contacted General Beauregard and asked him what the hurry was about. He would run out of food by April 15 and then withdraw his troops. President Davis, with this new information, instructed Beauregard to wait, but countermanded his own order when Fox's federal relief expedition suddenly materialized in Charleston Harbor at three in the morning on April 12.

Georgia's Robert Toombs, the Confederate secretary of state, pleaded with Davis that an attack on the federal provision fleet “at this time … is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.” The cabinet sustained the president's decision. Beauregard issued the ultimatum to Anderson, who refused to surrender. At 5:00 A.M. on April 12, 1861, the Confederate forces launched a general bombardment of Fort Sumter.
53

Residents of Charleston along the Battery clamored to the rooftops to witness the pyrotechnics, much as the citizens of Matamoros gaped at American troops across the Rio Grande fifteen years earlier awaiting a similar military display. After thirty-three hours and the explosion of nearly five thousand artillery shells, Major Anderson surrendered. General Beauregard allowed Fox's vessels, which had remained at a discreet distance from Confederate artillery, to transport Major Anderson and his men out of the harbor and back to the North. Despite the fierce bombardment, neither side experienced any fatalities, a deceptive start to what would become the bloodiest war in American history. Fort Sumter was now in the hands of the Confederate States of America.

Lincoln greeted the news from Sumter almost with a sense of relief. The Confederacy had fired the first shot: “They attacked Sumter. It fell and thus did more service than it otherwise would.” Lincoln did not want war, but only the surrender of the fort, something he would not countenance, would have mollified the Confederate authorities. The attack on Fort Sumter did more than begin the Civil War. General Beauregard and President Davis had accomplished something Lincoln could not: unifying the North against the Confederate States of America.
54

A great drama unfolds in the Book of Revelation as angels, demons, and mortals fight cataclysmic battles. The human race, in John's vision, is divided into the redeemed and the condemned. They are no mere spectators to this cosmic conflict, but are active participants in a war where good or evil will triumph. Revelation's view of history is progressive, with a series of victories for the forces of good over evil. But the final battle is the fiercest, as Satan rallies his minions to fight the armies of the Lord at a place called Armageddon. God's forces triumph ushering in the millennium, a thousand years of peace at the end of which Satan emerges from exile and “fire from heaven” destroys him and his followers once and for all. A “new heaven and a new earth” created by God appears, sheltering the righteous. In the spring of 1861, two nations claimed the mantle of God's Chosen Nation. He would choose only one.
55

Walt Whitman sauntered down Broadway at midnight on April 13, the street still thrumming with people and vehicles in this city that never slept. He had just witnessed a fine performance of Giuseppe Verdi's new opera,
A Masked Ball
, about the assassination of Swedish monarch Gustav III. What differed on this particular night was that newsboys, rarely about at this hour, were excitedly hawking extra editions of their newspapers. Whitman bought a copy and walked over to a circle of lamplight to read about what had caused the commotion. The sidewalk was crowded with like-minded readers, and one of them read the news aloud: “Southern forces in Charleston, South Carolina, had bombarded Fort Sumter.” The tug had come.
56

CHAPTER 9

JUST CAUSES

WAR ENERGIZED WALT WHITMAN.
An uncharacteristic pessimism had settled in the poet as the sectional crisis worsened. The firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops revived him. He took a bath, a baptism for a new birth. He went on a new diet. “I have this day, this hour, resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure, perfect, sweet, clean-blooded robust body … a great body, a purged, cleansed, spiritualized, invigorated body.” He rejoiced:

War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away;

War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to welcome it.
1

His city celebrated with him. A fog had lifted; the way was now clear. Ambiguity and uncertainty had dissipated. Major Anderson's quiet heroism and the firing on the American flag had dissolved partisan discord. “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now,” a New Yorker exclaimed. People poured into the streets, even in such southern-leaning places as New York City and Cincinnati, to proclaim their patriotism. George Ticknor, a Boston educator, marveled to an English friend, “The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favours and flags.… Civil war is freely accepted everywhere … by all, anarchy being the obvious, and perhaps the only alternative.” Pacifists who had rejected violence, even in support of righteous causes, turned bellicose. Ralph Waldo Emerson enthused, “Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”
2

War had become a magic elixir to speed America's millennial march, no longer the destroyer of lives or the waster of lands. New England theologian Orestes Brownson likened the war to a “thunderstorm that purifies the moral and political atmosphere.”
3

Peace had feminized and anesthetized northerners. Peace had allowed the scramble for wealth and place to transcend piety and patriotism. An editorial in
Harper's Weekly
in October 1861 predicted that war would reorder America's priorities. “Peace enervates and corrupts society; war strengthens and purifies.… [M]oney has grown to be the sole idol worshiped by the bulk of our people.… If this evil can be cured,… this a war will do.” Enthusiasm enveloped northerners. Otherwise sober publications extolled the war in terms better suited to advance publicity for a P. T. Barnum circus than to a deadly conflict.
Scientific American
promised “thrilling scenes … sublime daring, heroic achievement and grim horrors.” Step right up.
4

A similar frenzy gripped the South. Young men rushed to arms fearful that by the time they left their farms and small towns, the war would be over. A correspondent for the
London Times
reported immense throngs of people with “flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths,” cascading through southern city streets, rushing to Armageddon, while bands played spirited renditions of “Dixie” over and over again. Everyone was “full of zeal and patriotism!”
5

Like their northern counterparts, southerners rejoiced in the prospect of war. “Thank God the war is open,” a grateful South Carolina governor Francis Pickens declared. The war promised a spiritual rebirth. Virginia governor Henry A. Wise exulted, “I rejoice in this war.… It is a war of purification. You want war, fire, blood to purify you; and the Lord of Hosts has demanded that you should walk through fire and blood.”
6

The men and women who celebrated the war believed they were worthy of it. This second generation of Americans and their offspring carried the legacy of the American Revolution. Northerners saw the opportunity to extend and protect the Revolutionary legacy, to transform an experiment into a permanent, indivisible country. An Ohio recruit resolved, “Our Fathers made this country, we, their children are to save it.” Southerners sought to duplicate the work of the rebels of '76 and found a new nation. Ivy Duggan, a Georgia recruit, read the Revolution as teaching “us … to resist oppression, to declare and maintain independence, to govern ourselves as we think best.”
7

Young men went off to war for reasons other than God and country, especially in the Confederacy, where the concept of “country” was not yet fully formed. Some enlisted for personal reasons—to protect their homes and families, to experience something meaningful—or just because they had nothing else better to do. One reluctant Alabamian hastened to join when his girlfriend mailed a dress to him and suggested that he wear it if he would not enlist. Then there was the case of Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, who did not want to fight, nor did he favor one side over the other, but who joined a Confederate regiment because his friends did. Given his weak sense of commitment, it was not surprising that, after two weeks in camp fighting mosquitoes instead of Yankees, he lit out for Nevada Territory. Clemens spent the war out West safely spinning yarns, searching for gold, and writing newspaper columns about life on the frontier, some of which were true.
8

What is striking about the diaries and letters of the young men and of the families that they left behind is how much they had absorbed the cultural ideals of their generation. Each side persisted in the belief that the other threatened liberty and the Lord, and that only the fire of battle could save these ideals for now and for all time. The Civil War was not about territory per se; nor was it about wealth; nor was it about forms of government—remarkably few southerners mentioned states' rights at all in their correspondence. Rather, the war was about God and the fulfillment of His plan to complete the American Revolution. Some likened the conflict to Armageddon or identified it as Armageddon itself. This perspective presaged a brutal and lengthy war, for the stakes were as high as heaven.

Both sides claimed the Revolutionary mantle and the filial responsibility to emulate and protect it. One side fought to honor those ideals by reuniting the old Union, the other by establishing a new nation. Northerners worried that disunion would doom America's global destiny as a force for self-government worldwide. Abraham Lincoln emphasized America's global mission as “the last best hope of earth.” Northern recruits believed with their president that the future of self-government for mankind depended on the outcome of the war. “I do feel that the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote to his wife, “and if we are overcome then farewell to freedom.” Well into the war, even soldiers worn by the strain of battle vowed to fight on “for the great principles of liberty and self government at stake, for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century.”
9

Americans were also children of the Second Great Awakening. They had grown up believing in an omnipresent God who touched their lives and guided their country's destiny. He would take sides in the coming battle. In protecting the Revolutionary ideals, northerners would preserve God's plan to extend democracy and Christianity across an unbroken continent and around the world. Southerners welcomed a war to create a nation more perfect in its fealty to God than the one they left.

The war was a religious conflict for many evangelicals, a contest to save both souls and nations. A Louisiana woman wrote to her bishop, “We are fighting the Battle of the Cross against the Modern Barbarians who would rob a Christian people of Country, Liberty, and life.” Northern evangelicals believed that southerners, like the Indians and Mexicans, wallowed in a “heathenish condition.” One minister rejoiced, “What a wide field will soon be opened for Christian labor.”
10

The holy war inevitably engaged the issue of slavery. Both northerners and southerners recognized slavery as the immediate cause of the war. Soldiers from both sides connected the institution to the broader ideals of freedom and faith. A young Iowa man, explaining his reasons for volunteering, cited “duty to my country and my
God
,” to crush a rebellion instigated “to secure the extension of that blighting curse—
slavery
—o'er our fair land.” White southerners, regardless of whether they held slaves or not, believed in the “divine right of slaveholding.” They equated black slavery with white freedom. Northerners, in a mirror image, believed that defeat would speed their own enslavement. A Wisconsin recruit explained, “Home is sweet and friends are dear, but what would they all be to let the country go to ruin, and be a slave.” Not literally, of course, but these young northerners had grown up in a time when the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress had, in effect, nationalized slavery.
11

For African Americans, the war for freedom was more than a metaphor. The war represented Exodus and Armageddon rolled into one glorious cause. Frederick Douglass rejoiced that “the keen knife of liberty” hurtled at white southern throats. In a speech in June 1861, Douglass called the conflict a “war in heaven” between the archangel Michael and the dragon, and when it was over “not a slave should be left a slave in the returning footprints of the American army gone to put down this slaveholding rebellion.”
12

Northern religious rhetoric often focused on slavery. In November 1861, Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe penned the words to a song that became a surrogate anthem for the Union army during the war. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was the Rebel yell set to music, a bloodthirsty cry hurling wrath and sword against a profligate enemy. “Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel.” Howe encouraged the young Union soldiers to Christ-like martyrdom: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Howe had an epiphany after the war and became a pacifist.

Harriet Beecher Stowe believed she was witnessing the unfolding of the Book of Revelation. The Civil War was a millennial war, she and many fellow evangelicals believed, “the
last
struggle for liberty” that would precede the coming of the Lord. “God's just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant wrong.” Her brother Henry Ward Beecher related the familiar story of Exodus to his congregation, how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Red Sea, and how the sea parted and allowed the Chosen People to escape while burying their pursuers. “And now our turn has come,” he exclaimed. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of War.” And God was ready; foretelling Julia Ward Howe's famous lines, “that awful wine-press of the Wrath of Almighty God” would come down from the heavens and bury the South.
13

The causes of God and country blended together as the young men marched off to war, just as they had merged in the political crises of the 1850s. It was a natural conflation: a nation apart from history, sanctified by God, and a prelude to His coming. Political leaders spoke in biblical cadences and verses. And citizens believed in their country's divine destiny as much as in the salvation of their souls. When the young men wrote their first letters home or confided their thoughts to a diary, they wrote of how much they missed their loved ones, yet of how they felt themselves drawn to a cause greater than themselves. A diary entry from a twenty-three-year-old Iowa soldier: “Tuesday, July 9, 1861: I have volunteered to fight in this war for the Union and
a government
. I have left the peaceful walks of life and ‘buckled on the harness of war' not from any feeling of enthusiasm, nor incited by any hopes of honor [or] glory, but because I believe that duty to my country and my
God
, bid me assist in crushing this wicked rebellion against our government.”
14

Confederate soldiers expressed their secular reasons for fighting less in terms of country than in terms of self-determination or self-government and, most of all, home and family. Like the Union soldiers, they naturally blended the sacred and the secular in their writing. A Mississippian claimed he and his compatriots fought “for a sacred principle—for the right of self-government, for the protection of their homes, and their families and their altars.”
15

In the beginning, faith reinforced the romance of war. “The men first gathered to defend the borders were men … in whom the love of an abstract principle became, not a religion, but a romantic passion.” There were also men who responded skeptically to the call for a crusade, believing that to employ Christianity to kill represented less a sacred mission than a grave sacrilege. And there were men who saw through the charade of faith parading as patriotism. “All wars are sacred,” Rhett Butler scoffed, “to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?” Butler is fictional, of course; it would be difficult to find some contemporary to express such thoughts. Margaret Mitchell had the benefit of hindsight.
16

God may have authored the war, but men would have to fight it. The Confederate States of America faced, by far, the more difficult task. The list of challenges confronting President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress was daunting: create a nation and develop an attachment to it among a citizenry deeply suspicious of central government; overcome class, political, and geographic divisions to rally around a common cause; establish a financial system to run government and pay for war; erect factories to supply an army not yet raised; and direct farms and plantations to produce adequate food supplies for both civilian and military needs. Jefferson Davis was capable, but he was not a magician.

The wives of Confederate leaders cheered the transfer of the rebel capital from Montgomery to Richmond. From a strategic standpoint, Richmond's proximity to enemy territory may have been a disadvantage, but its location also lured Union forces into numerous ill-fated confrontations. “On to Richmond!” became less a battle cry than a punch line. From an esthetic standpoint, Richmond was a hands-down winner. Montgomery's muddy main street had once swallowed an oxen team whole after a particularly heavy rain. At the city's two hotels, the mosquitoes were the only guests that ate well. Many have portrayed the move to Richmond as a bow to Virginia's power, but Confederate congressmen could not wait to pack their bags. Besides, Richmond's seven hills gave Rebel leaders the illusion they shared something with Rome.