Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (58 page)

of the fort and set the interior on fire, Anderson's exhausted garrison surrendered. Able to man only a few of Sumter's forty-eight mounted guns, they had fired a thousand rounds in reply—without much effect. On April 14 the American flag came down and the Confederate stars and bars rose over Sumter.

This news galvanized the North. On April 15 Lincoln issued a proclamation calling 75,000 militiamen into national service for ninety days to put down an insurrection "too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." The response from free states was overwhelming. War meetings in every city and village cheered the flag and vowed vengeance on traitors. "The heather is on fire," wrote a Harvard professor who had been born during George Washington's presidency. "I never knew what a popular excitement can be. . . . The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favors and flags." From Ohio and the West came "one great Eagle-scream" for the flag. "The people have gone stark mad!"
⁸³
In New York City, previously a nursery of pro-southern sentiment, a quarter of a million people turned out for a Union rally. "The change in public sentiment here is wonderful—almost miraculous," wrote a New York merchant on April 18. "I look with awe on the national movement here in New York and all through the Free States," added a lawyer. "After our late discords, it seems supernatural." The "time before Sumter" was like another century, wrote a New York woman. "It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now."
⁸⁴

Democrats joined in the eagle-scream of patriotic fury. Stephen Douglas paid a well-publicized national unity call to the White House and then traveled home to Chicago, where he told a huge crowd: "There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war,
only patriots
—
or traitors."
A month later Douglas was dead—a victim probably of cirrhosis of the liver—but for a year or more his war spirit lived on among most Democrats. "Let our enemies perish by the sword," was the theme of

83
.
CWL
, IV, 331–32;
Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2
vols. (Boston, 1876), II, 433–34; Jane Stuart Woolsey to a friend, May 10, 1861, in Henry Steele Commager, ed.,
The Blue and the Gray, 2
vols. (rev. and abridged ed., New York, 1973), I, 48; Jacob D. Cox, "War Preparations in the North," in
Battles and Leaders
, I, 86.

84
. Philip S. Foner,
Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict
(Chapel Hill, 1941), 207; Strong,
Diary
, 136; Commager, ed.,
Blueand Gray
, I, 47.

Democratic editorials in the spring of 1861. "All squeamish sentimentality should be discarded, and bloody vengeance wreaked upon the heads of the contemptible traitors who have provoked it by their dastardly impertinence and rebellious acts."
⁸⁵

To the War Department from northern governors came pleas to increase their states' quotas of troops. Lincoln had called on Indiana for six regiments; the governor offered twelve. Having raised the requisitioned thirteen regiments, Ohio's governor wired Washington that "without seriously repressing the ardor of the people, I can hardly stop short of twenty." From Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts came a terse telegram two days after Lincoln's call for troops: "Two of our regiments will start this afternoon—one for Washington, the other for Fort Monroe; a third will be dispatched tomorrow, and the fourth before the end of the week."
⁸⁶
It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.

85
. Robert W. Johannsen,
Stephen A. Douglas
(New York, 1973), 868;
Wisconsin DailyPatriot
, April 24, 1861,
Columbus Daily Capital City Fact
, April 13, 1861, in Perkins, ed.,
Northern Editorials
, 750, 727.

86
. Robert E. Sterling, "Civil War Draft Resistance in the Middle West," Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1974, pp. 15–16;
O.R
., Ser. 3, Vol. 1, p.79

9
Facing Both Ways: The Upper South's Dilemma

I

The outbreak of war at Fort Sumter confronted the upper South with a crisis of decision. Its choice could decide the fate of the Confederacy. These eight states contained most of the South's resources for waging war: more than half of its population, two-thirds of its white population, three-quarters of its industrial capacity, half of its horses and mules, three-fifths of its livestock and food crops. In addition, men of high potential as military leaders hailed from these states: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, James E. B. Stuart, and Ambrose Powell Hill of Virginia; Daniel H. Hill of North Carolina; Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood of Kentucky; Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee.

The upper South's response to Lincoln's April 15 militia requisition seemed to promise well for the Confederacy. Kentucky "will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States," the governor wired Washington. Tennessee "will not furnish a single man for the purpose of coercion," proclaimed her governor, "but fifty thousand if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers." The secessionist governor of Missouri hurled the gage at the president's feet: "Your requisition is illegal, unconstitutional, revolutionary, inhuman. . . . Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade." The governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas sent similar replies, while the governors of Maryland and Delaware remained ominously silent.
¹

These references to "our rights" and "southern brothers" suggest the motives that impelled four of the eight states into the Confederacy and left three others with large secessionist minorities. "We must either identify ourselves with the North or the South," wrote a Virginian, while two former North Carolina unionists expressed the view of most of their fellows: "The division must be made on the line of slavery. The South must go with the South. . . . Blood is thicker than Water."
²
Newspapers in Tennessee and Arkansas proclaimed that "the identity of object and the community of interest existing in all the slaveholding States must and will unite them." Faced with a choice between "subjugation" and defense of "honor . . . liberty . . . rights," the decision was "as certain as the laws of gravity."
³

In the eyes of southern unionists, this tragic war was mainly Lincoln's fault. What the president described in his proclamation of April 15 calling out the militia as a necessary measure to "maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union" was transmuted south of the Potomac into an unconstitutional coercion of sovereign states. "In North Carolina the Union sentiment was largely in the ascendant and gaining strength until Lincoln prostrated us," wrote a bitter unionist. "He could have adopted no policy so effectual to destroy the Union. . . . I am left no other alternative but to fight for or against my section. . . . Lincoln has made us a unit to resist until we repel our invaders or die." John Bell, the 1860 presidential candidate of the Constitutional Union party from whom many moderates in the upper South took their cue, announced in Nashville on April 23 his support for a "united South" in "the unnecessary, aggressive, cruel, unjust wanton war which is being forced upon us" by Lincoln's mobilization of militia.
⁴

1
.
O.R
., Series III, Vol. I, pp. 70, 72, 76, 81, 83.

2
.
Staunton Vindicator
, March 22, 1861, quoted in Donald E. Reynolds,
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis
(Nashville, 1970), 196;
Wilmington Journal
, March 4, 1861, quoted in W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds.,
North Carolina Civil War Documentary
(Chapel Hill, 1980), 21;
Raleigh Register
, May 10, 1861.

3
.
Nashville Patriot
, April 24, 1861,
Nashville Republican Banner
, May 9, 1861, in Dwight L. Dumond, ed.,
Southern Editorials on Secession
(Washington, 1931), 511, 514;
Fort Smith Daily Times and Herald
, April 5, 1861, quoted in Reynolds,
Editors Make War
, 195–96.

4
. James G. de.R. Hamilton, ed.,
The Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2
vols. (Raleigh, 1909), I, 143, 150–51; J. Milton Henry, "Revolution in Tennessee, February 1861 to June 1861,"
Tennessee Historical Quarterly
, 18 (1959), 115; Mary E. R. Campbell,
The Attitude of Tennesseeans toward the Union, 1847–1861
(New York, 1961), 194.

Such explanations for conversion to secession were undoubtedly sincere. But their censure of Lincoln had a certain self-serving quality. The claim that his call for troops was the cause of the upper South's decision to secede is misleading. As the telegraph chattered reports of the attack on Sumter April 12 and its surrender next day, huge crowds poured into the streets of Richmond, Raleigh, Nashville, and other upper South cities to celebrate this victory over the Yankees. These crowds waved Confederate flags and cheered the glorious cause of southern independence. They demanded that their own states join the cause. Scores of such demonstrations took place from April 12 to 14,
before
Lincoln issued his call for troops. Many conditional unionists were swept along by this powerful tide of southern nationalism; others were cowed into silence.

News of Sumter's fall reached Richmond on the evening of April 13. A jubilant procession marched on the state capital where a battery fired a hundred-gun salute "in honor of the victory." The crowd lowered the American flag from the capital building and ran up the Confederate stars and bars. Everyone "seemed to be perfectly frantic with delight, I never in all my life witnessed such excitement," wrote a participant. "Everyone is in favor of secession." Citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina, reacted to the news of Sumter with "the wildest excitement," flew Confederate flags from public buildings, and fired salutes to them. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, the correspondent of the
Times
of London watched "an excited mob" with "flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for 'Jeff Davis' and 'the Southern Confederacy,' so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with 'Dixie's Land.' " These outbursts were not merely a defensive response to northern aggression. Rather they took on the character of a celebration, a joyous bonding with southern brothers who had scored a triumph over the Black Republican Yankees.
⁵

The Virginia convention moved quickly to adopt an ordinance of

5
. Letter from J. H. Baughman of Richmond, April 14, 1861, quoted in Henry T. Shanks,
The Secession Movement in Virginia
, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934), 268n.; J. Carlyle Sitterson,
The Secession Movement in North Carolina
(Chapel Hill, 1939), 239; William Howard Russell, My
Diary North and South
, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 52.

secession, but not quickly enough for an
ad hoc
assembly in another Richmond hall that called itself the "Spontaneous Southern Rights Convention." Passions ran high on the streets and in both convention halls. Mobs threatened violence against unionist delegates from west of the Alleghenies. On April 17 ex-Governor Henry Wise electrified the official convention with a fiery speech. He announced that Virginia militia were
at that instant
seizing the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and preparing to seize the Gosport navy yard near Norfolk. At such a moment no true Virginian could hesitate; the convention passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 88 to 55.
⁶

Although Wise's announcement was slightly premature, he knew whereof he spoke: he had planned the Harper's Ferry expedition himself. A hard-bitten secessionist whose long white hair and wrinkled face made him look older than his fifty-four years, Wise had been governor when John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry. Perhaps this experience turned Wise's mind to the importance of the rifle works there, one of the two armories owned by the United States government (the other was at Springfield, Massachusetts). Without consulting Virginia's current Governor John Letcher, whom he considered lukewarm on secession, Wise met with militia officers on April 16 to set their regiments in motion for Harper's Ferry and Norfolk. Letcher belatedly approved these moves. On April 18, one day after passage of the secession ordinance, several companies of militia closed in on Harper's Ferry, defended by 47 U.S. army regulars. To prevent capture of the valuable rifle machinery, the soldiers set fire to the works and fled. The Virginians moved in and saved most of the machinery, which they shipped to Richmond, where it soon began turning out guns for the Confederacy.