Coming Fury, Volume 1 (42 page)

Fort Sumter itself, he realized, would be “a perfect Gibraltar” if it were properly garrisoned and armed. The weakness of its garrison was his greatest advantage, and the obvious strategy was to make certain that the garrison remain weak—in other words, to mount guns so that the Federal government would find it impossible to reinforce the place. Tactfully but firmly, he began to rearrange
the batteries, concentrating on sealing off the harbor rather than on simply piling up the armaments that would fire on Fort Sumter itself. Along the sandy shores of Morris and Sullivan’s islands he built new detached batteries, devised to control the seaward approaches. The defenses at Fort Moultrie were rebuilt, mortar batteries were put where the guns of Fort Sumter could not reach them, and Major Anderson’s lookouts could see signs of new activity all around the harbor. Anderson and Beauregard, incidentally, were no strangers. Years ago, when Anderson was an instructor in artillery at West Point, Cadet Beauregard had been one of his students, and had shown such talent that Anderson had had him retained as an assistant instructor.
⁷

Beauregard was sensitive to points of pride and honor. In effect he was making a complete change in the military installations around the harbor, but he was fully aware that the South Carolina troops he was commanding were not at all like the regular soldiers of the old army. They were, as he saw them, “gallant and sensitive gentlemen” who had left comfortable homes “to endure the privations and exposures of a soldier’s life” on bleak and comfortless islands where harsh winds from the sea kicked up annoying sand storms. Among the private soldiers were planters and the sons of planters, some of them the wealthiest men in South Carolina, proud as Lucifer, doing pick-and-shovel work in many cases alongside of their own slaves; and they had to be handled with some delicacy. This delicacy Beauregard had, and although he was undoing much that they had worked hard to do, they made no complaints. Instead they quickly made Beauregard their idol.
⁸

Control of things at Charleston, accordingly, passed into the hands of the Confederate government with a minimum of difficulty, and Jefferson Davis had passed his first acid test. He had at least made it certain that the war would not be begun through sheer irresponsibility. The harebrained plan to start the shooting before Lincoln could take office, on the theory that this would somehow put the Federal government at a crippling disadvantage, had been quietly laid to rest. Thrust so suddenly into a position where he must create a new government against the most profound handicaps, Davis had won at least a little of the time he needed so desperately. He had had, too, his first encounter with a problem
that was finally to prove insoluble, even though this first encounter had been successful—the necessity for adjusting the eternal clamor of states’ rights to the overriding requirements of the central government.

Davis was formally inaugurated President on February 18, in an impressive ceremony on a platform built in front of the portico of the state capitol at Montgomery. There was a parade, with a six-horse team of matched grays pulling the presidential carriage, with brightly uniformed militia companies marching, with cannon firing salutes, and with 10,000 people crowding around to see and hear. When the party reached the platform, and Howell Cobb, as President of the Confederate Congress, presented a Bible and administered the oath of office, there was a breathless silence, in which Davis’s “So help me God” rang out clearly. An impressionable correspondent for the New York
Herald
, deeply moved, wrote that “God does not permit evil to be done with such earnest solemnity, such all-pervading trust in His Providence, as was exhibited by the whole people on that day,” and an Alabama lady wrote that the slim, erect figure of the new President made her think of General Andrew Jackson, “though he is much more a gentleman in his manners than the old General ever
wished
to be.” The editor of the Montgomery
Weekly Advertiser
concluded that “if, after this, our enemies at the North shall persist in representing that the seceded states are not in earnest, they will fully entitle themselves to be recorded among those who having ears hear not and having eyes see not.”
⁹

In his inaugural address, Davis struck the note that he was to sound to the end of his days: secession was right, reasonable, legal, a peaceful exercise by the sovereign people of an unassailable liberty, a step taken from necessity rather than by choice. There was no real reason for any conflict between this new nation and the old one from which it had separated, and “if a just perception of mutual interest shall permit us peaceably to pursue our separate political career, my most earnest desire will have been fulfilled.” Still, it was necessary for the Confederacy to be ready for anything: “If this be denied to us, and the integrity of our territory and jurisdiction be assailed, it will but remain to us with firm resolve to appeal to arms and invoke the blessing of Providence on a just cause.” It was
quite possible, he believed, that some states still in the Union would presently want to join the Confederacy, and the Constitution made full provision for this; but this new nation was permanent, and “a re-union with the States from which we have separated is neither practicable nor desirable.”

For the rest: “It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart, where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole; where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent, the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice and sustained by a virtuous people. Reverently let us invoke the God of our Fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which by His blessing they are able to vindicate, establish and transmit to their posterity. With the continuance of His favor ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace and to prosperity.”

There was in all of this no trace of the fire-eater’s bugle call, and no faintest hint of any call to the revolutionary barricades. Davis was appealing to the intellect rather than to the emotions. To Mrs. Davis he wrote that beyond the cheers and the smiles displayed by his audience he saw “troubles and thorns innumerable,” and he outlined them briefly: “We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by a powerful opposition; but I do not despond, and will not shrink from the task imposed upon me.”
¹⁰
He had made his inaugural address almost plaintive in its repeated assumption that no one who examined the facts could fail to see the complete reasonableness and justice of the Southern position. If the independence of the Confederacy could be talked into reality, these were the words that might do it. Under the circumstances as they were on February 18, 1861, they were probably the only words the new President could have used. There was nothing in them to touch the heart and quicken the pulse. Nothing of that kind was needed, because the Southern pulse was already beating about as fast as it well could.

Davis’s insistence that the new government was permanent and that there would be no reconstruction of the Union was not put in his speech by accident. Amid all of the rejoicings that
attended the construction of this new government, there was one haunting fear to disturb the slumbers of devout patriots—the prospect that the whole business might in the end turn out to be what optimists in the North had supposed it was, a political maneuver pure and simple that would end in a reconstruction of the old Union. The Charleston
Mercury
had been grumbling all winter, complaining that a reconstruction plan lay somewhere underneath everything the Montgomery convention had tried to do. Darkly it mused that in such case the South would have “the same battle to fight all over again,” that “we will have run a round circle and end where we started.” It was known that some of the slave-state leaders who were still in Washington had reconstruction in mind, and Stephen A. Douglas was actively working for such a development. Privately, he had drafted tentative terms: the independence of the Confederacy would be recognized, but the two governments would be bound together tightly in a commercial union, with common laws governing trade, commerce, navigation, tariffs, patents, and the like, with a president and a council to handle all economic matters and with each nation guaranteeing the defense of the other—a strange, probably impractical, but nevertheless interesting scheme for a dual republic which would tie two separate unions into one greater union. People who were close to Douglas were lobbying in Montgomery; among them the forceful and erratic George Sanders, the Kentucky-born political and financial fixer from New York, who had headed the lusty, expansive “Young America” movement during the 1850s and had had a good deal to do with the famous Ostend Manifesto. Big-bodied, powerful, with blue eyes and an air of disheveled energy, Sanders now seemed to be agitating for a rebuilding of the old Union.
¹¹

The cabinet that President Davis selected did not, in its composition, seem to offer the thick-and-thin secessionists a great deal of encouragement. By and large, it represented the conservative element. Carefully selected to give representation to each of the seceding states, it brought together a group of Southerners who were eminently respectable but not in the least revolutionary-minded. It included only one man who could be listed with the original fire-eaters—Robert Toombs, of Georgia, Secretary of State. Christopher Memminger, of South Carolina, was named Secretary of
the Treasury after Robert Barnwell had declined a cabinet post—a thrifty, small-scale lawyer and politician, of whom the Rhetts complained that he had opposed secession up to the last moment. Leroy Pope Walker, of Alabama, was Secretary of War, and Stephen Russell Mallory, of Florida, was Secretary of the Navy. Postmaster General was John H. Reagan, of Texas, and former Senator Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana, was Attorney General. Davis remarked afterward that none of these appointees was on close personal terms with him at the time the cabinet was organized; two, indeed, were utter strangers to him, chosen on the recommendation of local political leaders.

One thing was clear: the cabinet did not represent the famous planter aristocracy. Three of its members—Memminger, Mallory, and Benjamin—had been born abroad. All of the cabinet appointees, at one time or another, had been Unionists, and two had opposed secession until their own states seceded. For better or for worse, Davis had not tried the experiment Lincoln was trying, of bringing in the most forceful leaders the nation’s politics had to offer; none of these men had either the stature or the desire to take the reins away from the President and direct the government. The executive would be Jefferson Davis and no one else.
¹²

Excluded from the top posts in the government, and living amid rumors that sooner or later the old Union might be put back together, the fire-eaters felt that they had ground for worry. The frantic effort to set off the guns in Charleston harbor may have represented a desire to put pressure on the Confederate government as well as on the government in Washington. Yet this worry was largely without solid foundation. The fire-eaters’ biggest maneuver had been successful: the new government was established and operating before Lincoln took office, and from the moment he took the oath, the Republican President would have to face the hard fact that the Union had actually been broken. Furthermore, although Davis was talking about peace, he was ready to fight and knew that he almost certainly would have to fight, and there was a great deal of iron in him. He had handled his first big problem, that of getting South Carolina under control, with deft speed; he immediately addressed himself to the second, which had to do with the Federal government at Washington.

On February 25 Davis named three commissioners to go to Washington and negotiate for the surrender of Federal forts and other installations in secession territory. He chose his men carefully: A. B. Roman, of Louisiana, an old-line Whig who had supported Bell in the presidential election, Martin J. Crawford, of Georgia, who had been a Breckinridge supporter, and John Forsyth, of Alabama, a Douglas man. Representing the three principal wings of Southern politics, these men, Davis felt, ought to be able to win “the sympathy and cooperation of every element of conservatism with which they might have occasion to deal.” The spirit of his inaugural address ran through his instructions to these commissioners: they were to go to Washington in the most friendly spirit and were to ask for the things to which the Confederacy obviously was entitled—recognition, surrender of forts, arsenals, and other public property, and a general settlement of debts and other disputed matters. Davis was assuming that the separation was permanent, and from this assumption he would not depart as long as there was the remotest chance that it could be made good.

His private opinion was that there would be a war, and his Congress swung around to this view somewhat reluctantly but fairly quickly. It empowered the Confederate President to summon and use the militia of the several states, and shortly afterward expanded this by providing for a Confederate army “to repel invasion” which would be composed of the militia and of at least 100,000 volunteers. It directed the Committee on Naval Affairs to consider the propriety of building iron-clad frigates and gunboats, it provided for the establishment of a general staff for the army, it passed elaborate regulations to govern the rank that might be given to former officers in the United States Army, and it devised a national flag. On March 4, 1861, this flag was formally hoisted to the staff over the capitol building in Montgomery.
¹³

There was a gale during the night, but it blew itself out before dawn and March 4 came in cloudy, raw, and gusty, with streaks
of moderate warmth. The correspondent for
Harper’s Weekly
believed that there were 25,000 visitors in Washington and said that many of them had been unable to find sleeping quarters. Newspaperman Henry Villard remarked that although the city did not contain one good restaurant, it had “no end of bar rooms,” most of which were doing a fine business, and he felt that the city looked like an untidy overgrown village, indolent and unfinished but crowded and somehow vibrant with life. Most of the streets were unpaved and muddy, and the open plaza east of the Capitol was cluttered with castings and building blocks for the still incomplete dome. Beyond this litter, as day came in, a battery of regular artillery casually unlimbered and took position in full view of the temporary platform where Abraham Lincoln would presently take the oath as sixteenth President of the United States.