Coming Fury, Volume 1 (49 page)

The Fort Sumter expedition would sail just as soon as Captain Fox had everything in order, and yet somewhere in his mind Lincoln seems to have held a faint hope that some peaceful arrangement might yet be made. The Virginia convention, which might or might not vote the Old Dominion out of the Union, was still in session, and even before Lincoln became President, he had explored the possibility of a deal. To William C. Rives, one of the Virginia delegates, Lincoln had in February offered to abandon Fort Sumter if the convention would adjourn
sine die
without passing an ordinance of secession. Now, even as he was concluding that the Sumter expedition must go forward, it appears that Lincoln, in one form or another, renewed this offer.

There is a certain mystery that still hangs over most of the things that happened during the first week in April 1861, but it seems reasonably clear that Lincoln got word to Richmond that he would like to talk with some Unionist-minded delegate to the secession convention, and on April 4 John B. Baldwin came to see him. To him, Lincoln apparently repeated what he had said to Rives six weeks earlier—he would swap a fort for a state and consider it a good bargain. The deal could not be made: Baldwin was in no condition to bind the secession convention, adjournment could easily be followed by the calling of a new convention, and in studying what passes for a record of the conversation, one gets the feeling that neither man could quite understand the pressures that bore upon the other. About all that can be said with real assurance is that the negotiation, whatever might conceivably have come of it, got nowhere. One is left with a haunting feeling that everyone might have been much better off if this particular avenue had been explored earlier and much more vigorously.
¹⁰

Meanwhile there was a final, comic-opera mix-up which had no especial effect on the course of history but which does stand as a striking illustration of the strange way in which the administration
conducted its business during the first half-dozen weeks of its tenure.

In selecting naval vessels to meet Captain Fox off the entrance to Charleston harbor, Secretary Welles had specified that the steamer
Powhatan
be flagship of the force, and
Powhatan
’s skipper, Captain Samuel Mercer, received orders to that effect. Secretary Seward, however, was backing the Fort Pickens expedition, and he wanted
Powhatan
for this service. Furthermore, he wanted
Powhatan
commanded by Lieutenant Porter, who was working closely with Captain Meigs in the project. Orders were accordingly prepared relieving Mercer and putting Porter in his place, and Seward took these orders to the White House and got Lincoln’s signature on them. It appears that the President signed without quite realizing what he was signing, and it is wholly certain that Secretary Welles, who supposed that he had full authority to assign warships and officers, knew nothing at all about the business.

Powhatan
was due to sail from New York on April 6. Just before sailing time, Porter appeared, flourished Lincoln’s order, dispossessed Mercer (over the latter’s strong objection), and assumed command of the warship. Mercer got on the wire to the Navy Department, and Welles indignantly hurried to the White House, collecting Seward en route. There were explanations, complaints, and at last an abashed admission by the President that the order to Porter should never have been issued. Welles was told to wire New York, restoring Mercer to
Powhatan
’s command, and he immediately did so. Porter, however, refused to pay any attention to this order, on the ground that he had been put in command of the warship by the President of the United States and could be relieved by no lesser authority. In the end he sailed
Powhatan
off for Pensacola in spite of everybody, depriving the Fort Sumter expedition of better than 25 per cent of its naval strength. In the long run this made little difference; what mattered at Charleston was that the shooting began there, and the result would have been the same even if
Powhatan
had been present.
¹¹

Secretary Seward was coming to the end of his period of assumption of authority; the end was not graceful and the aftermath was not good. John A. Campbell and the Confederate commissioners were beginning to suspect that the Secretary had been playing games
with them, and on April 7 Campbell sent to Seward a melancholy letter of inquiry. There were increasing rumors, he said, that the government was mounting some sort of expedition for the Confederate seacoast, and although the Justice continued to believe that this could not be aimed at Fort Sumter, he did feel that something ought to be said or done to quiet the rising excitement. He included in his letter a quotation that was more apt than he perhaps realized: “Such government by blind-man’s buff, stumbling along too far, will end by the general over-turn.” Seward immediately sent a reply: “Faith as to Sumter fully kept—wait and see.”

It is hard to be sure just what faith Seward believed that he was talking about. An official messenger had already left for Charleston with a word from the President to Governor Pickens, and Seward knew it; he knew, as well, that Fox would be sailing in forty-eight hours, and that his convoying warships had already left. Deceiving Campbell, he was still deceiving himself, for he appears to have been convinced, even at this late hour, that everything would at last wind up in peace, harmony, and joyful reunion. On the night after he wrote that message for Justice Campbell, Seward chatted with Russell, of the London
Times
, over the whist table in Seward’s house and assured the correspondent that even the secessionists would presently understand that the administration had no aggressive intent. “When the Southern states see that we mean them no wrong—that we intend no violence to persons, rights, or things,” he told Russell, “they will see their mistake and one after another they will come back into the Union.” This happy turn of events, he said, would take place within three months. A Secretary of State is of course entitled to plant untruths in a great newspaper if that will advance his country’s interests, but in this case it may be that Seward really meant what he was saying. The belief that a huge, untapped reservoir of Unionist sentiment in the South would yet wash away all traces of secession was a long time dying.
¹²

There had been too much loose talk, and the whole administration had been weakened by it. Mr. Stanton wrote to his good friend Buchanan at this time that hardly anyone in the capital had any confidence in the new regime. “A strong feeling of distrust in the candor and sincerity of Lincoln personally, and of his Cabinet has sprung up,” he declared. “If they had been merely silent and secret,
there might have been no ground of complaint. But assurances are said to have been given, and declarations made, in conflict with the facts now transpiring in respect to the South, so that no one speaks of Lincoln or any member of his cabinet with respect or regard.”
¹³

It was on April 7 that Justice Campbell was assured that the faith had been fully kept in connection with Fort Sumter. Technically, this was perhaps correct, in a limited sort of way. Campbell’s last promise from the Secretary had been the pledge that the government would not try to provision the fort without first telling the governor of South Carolina; and on April 8 a War Department clerk named Robert S. Chew showed up in Charleston bearing instructions written by President Lincoln which read thus:

“You will proceed directly to Charleston, South Carolina; and if, on your arrival there, the flag of the United States shall be flying over Fort Sumpter, and the Fort shall not have been attacked, you will procure an interview with Gov. Pickens, and read to him as follows: ‘I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such 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 upon the Fort.’ ”
¹⁴

Chew delivered his message that evening. It probably surprised no one except the unhappy commissioners in Washington; the Confederate authorities both in Montgomery and at Charleston had taken very little stock in the fine reports that had been coming down from the North. As early as April 2 Beauregard had been warned by Secretary of War Walker that “the Government has not at any time placed any reliance on assurances by the Government in Washington in respect to the evacuation of Fort Sumter, or entertained any confidence in the disposition of the latter to make any confession or yield any point to which it is not driven by absolute necessity.” Beauregard was instructed that he should be as active and alert “as if you were in the presence of an enemy contemplating to surprise you.”
¹⁵

Charleston immediately passed Chew’s message along to Montgomery, where President Davis and his cabinet considered it. It was clear that there could be but one answer; possession of Fort Sumter was as much a cardinal point of Davis’s policy as of Lincoln’s.
Strangely enough, it was the impetuous, hard-driving Robert Toombs who was reluctant to act. When the telegram was first shown to him he remarked: “The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen; and I do not feel competent to advise you.” The discussion went on for a long time—this was not a matter to be settled on the spur of the moment—and Toombs paced the floor, hands clasped behind him, staring off at nothing. Finally he stopped, faced President Davis, and urged against opening fire.

“Mr. President,” he said, “at this time it 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.”
¹⁶

It would be hard to put, in one paragraph, a better explanation of the tactical insight behind Lincoln’s decision to send Captain Fox down to Charleston harbor.

On April 10 the discussion had been concluded, and if Davis had ever had any serious doubts about what his course should be, he had resolved them. On this morning Secretary Walker sent Beauregard his instructions:

“If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force you will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such manner as you may determine, to reduce it.”
¹⁷

The siege had been carried on in earnest, but it had been like a formalized ritual carried on between friends. The Federal soldiers in the fort and the South Carolina soldiers who encircled it maintained polite relations while they got ready to kill each other, and when the big guns they were lining up went off by accident, or were fired in the wrong direction, letters of apology were quickly sent and gracefully acknowledged.

The guns had been doing a good deal of firing all winter long. Fort Sumter and South Carolina were still at peace, but their gun crews had to be exercised and there was need for target practice. Delegates to the South Carolina convention cruised about in the harbor by steamboat at the end of March, watching the discharge of guns in the different batteries, noting the way heavy shell could be exploded squarely over the deep-water channel—and, after the firing had ended, enjoying “a very handsome collation” of chicken salad, sandwiches, and cake and wine. Passing Fort Sumter on the way home, the delegates could see Federal officers on the parapet, and believed Anderson himself was surveying them with a telescope.
¹

Now and then there were accidents. Anderson’s men mounted a ten-inch Columbiad as a mortar in the parade ground, pointing it at Charleston’s fabled park, The Battery; to see if the alignment was correct, they got Major Anderson’s permission to fire one shot with a greatly reduced charge. The reduction in the charge was insufficient; the gun threw its projectile in a soaring parabola that almost landed it in downtown Charleston, and there was a flurry of intense excitement, with officers coming out under flag of truce to ask the major if he was really starting the war. Explanations and an apology followed, and the excitement died down. Similarly, a few days later, some inexpert gun layer in one of Beauregard’s gun crews fired a shot that actually nicked a corner of Fort Sumter itself. Again there were flags of truce, inquiries, and apologies. On April 3, when the tension had appreciably risen, the little schooner
Rhoda B.
Shannon
, carrying ice down from Boston to Savannah, came blundering up the channel toward Charleston harbor and was promptly fired on, one ball splitting her mainsail. Anderson’s drums beat his men to quarters, and at least five of his officers demanded that he open fire on the nearest Confederate battery; Anderson temporized, sent an inquiry ashore under a flag, learned that the schooner’s captain had simply lost his way and that he carried nothing the Sumter garrison wanted in any case, and the incident was closed.
²

Once, early in the spring, Mrs. Anderson came down from New York for a visit, bringing with her Peter Hart, who had been a sergeant in Anderson’s company in the Mexican War. Mrs.
Anderson felt that with so much disaffection everywhere her husband ought to have one man on whom he could rely implicitly, so she was bringing him this former sergeant. Reaching Charleston, she went to Governor Pickens, who immediately gave her a pass to go to the fort; he did not think he could issue a pass for Sergeant Hart—after all, the man constituted reinforcements, of a sort—but Mrs. Anderson talked him into it, and a Confederate guard boat took her and the former sergeant out to the fort. A Federal sentry cried a challenge as the boat neared the fort, and a Confederate officer took up his speaking trumpet and called: “Mrs. Major Anderson!” Back came the summons: “Mrs. Anderson, advance”—and the major’s wife and the ex-soldier whom he could trust came on to the wharf, and Major Anderson ran out crying “My glorious wife!”