Dixie Betrayed (7 page)

On the evening of April 12, rain fell on Charleston. Anderson ordered his firing suspended. On the Confederate side, an occasional
mortar shell was sent toward Sumter throughout the night. The Federal soldiers finally had the chance to sleep, “well but
hungry.” Meanwhile, five Federal ships approached, stocked with provisions and the opportunity for escape if necessary. Lincoln’s
special agent Gustavus Vasa Fox attempted to coordinate the movements of the
Harriet Lane,
the
Pawnee,
the
Baltic,
the
Powhatan,
and the
Pocahontas.
Fox, a former naval lieutenant and woolen goods merchant, was a Massachusetts native who would several months hence become
the assistant secretary of the navy. But the movements coordinated by Fox were impeded by heavy seas and a dense fog that
formed before dawn.

On the morning of April 13, the storm subsided. Gunfire from Sumter was slowed considerably in order to conserve ammunition.
Confederate fire was hot, however, in both senses of the word. By 8 a.m. hot shot from Rebel guns started a fire in Sumter’s
officers’ quarters, and despite the improvised firefighting efforts, the blaze was slowly spreading. Anderson and his officers
worried about the possibility of flames or sparks reaching the magazine, which would be catastrophic.

The shot and shell rained in as heavily as ever. Sparks, cinders, and burning pieces of debris launched upward only to rain
down on the spreading fire, eventually igniting several shells and kegs of powder, causing a few large explosions. Desperate,
Anderson had much of the powder thrown into the harbor.

By now the whole fort was becoming an inferno; the Federal ships were nowhere in sight, and the sally port and heavy entrance
gates had been wrecked by shell fire. The flagstaff had been splintered repeatedly. At 1:30 p.m. the flagstaff in Sumter fell.
Col. Louis Trezevant Wigfall had returned to his native state and had joined G. T. Beauregard’s staff as an aide-de-camp.
James Simons, a brigadier general of the South Carolina militia, was determined to find out if this act meant surrender. Before
Simons could get an official party off in a nearby rowboat, however, Wigfall demanded that Pvt. Gourdin Young of the Palmetto
Guard row him out to the fort. In a bizarre scene aboard a skiff, Wigfall and Young moved north amid the hail of metal. Once
Wigfall reached the esplanade, he tied a white kerchief to his sword, got out of the boat, and approached the sally port.

Wigfall found Capt. Jefferson C. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) and exclaimed that Beauregard had suggested
surrender was inevitable. Wigfall then went atop the parapet and waved a white flag, but the firing continued. Anderson approached
and said he would capitulate to leave now, rather than on April 15, if the garrison could take its arms and property, honor
the United States by saluting its flag, and be transported northward. This was acceptable, said Wigfall. Wigfall had absolutely
no authority from Beauregard or anyone else to accept such terms; he did so of his own volition.

The politician returned to Morris Island in the skiff, which flew a white flag, and firing died down from all points. Now,
to confuse the issue further, Beauregard’s authorized emissaries—Pryor, Lee, and the politician William Porcher Miles—approached
the fort. They inquired about Anderson’s needs and discussed the situation of the blaze, which was dying down. They asked
Anderson about surrender terms, and he replied that terms had already been agreed on with Wigfall. The three Confederates
were dumbfounded and explained that Wigfall had no such authority and that he hadn’t even seen Beauregard for two days. Confused,
the men stood inside the crumbled and burning fort and discussed the surrender. Anderson became upset about the misunderstanding.
“Very well, gentlemen, you may return to your batteries,” he snapped at his artillerists.
¹⁶
But Pryor, Lee, and Miles convinced him to continue a cease-fire until they could talk again with Beauregard, who accepted
all the terms except for allowing the Yankees to salute their flag.

After further negotiation, the parties agreed to evacuate and transfer themselves and their supplies on the next morning,
Sunday, April 14. The Yankees marched out of the fort “with colors flying and drums beating,” Anderson recounted.
¹⁷
After thirty-four hours of bombardment, the first engagement of the war was over, and the Confederates had won. The battle
had been bloodless. Ironically, however, the pomp and circumstance of the departure ceremony killed two: one of the cannon
fired by Anderson’s command produced a spark that was blown into a stand of gunpowder. The resulting explosion mortally wounded
both Pvt. Daniel Hough and Pvt. Edward Galloway. They were the first to die in America’s greatest conflict. Many more were
now to come.

E
STABLISHED
with the other Confederate agencies in February 1861, the War Department had jurisdiction over all matters pertaining to
the Confederate army and to Indian tribes as well. All orders were subject to Jefferson Davis’s approval, and because Davis
had served as secretary of war for Franklin Pierce and fancied himself the nation’s leading military mind, his meddling in
the department’s affairs soon would become legendary.

Davis’s choice for war secretary was a poor one, made to balance political favors handed to various states for representation
in the government. Leroy Pope Walker, age forty-four, was an Alabama politician who, as the son of a U.S. senator, grew up
with politics in his blood. Balding and with a fluffy gray beard, Walker looked like a small-town lawyer concentrating on
petty legal disputes rather than someone who would run a powerful governmental department. A successful attorney, Walker staunchly
had defended Southern rights and slavery throughout his career and, in 1860, served as an aide in the Alabama legislature
to Senator William L. Yancey. Walker had spoken frequently for Southern candidate John C. Breckinridge in the presidential
canvass and served briefly as a brigadier general of the Alabama militia. When Davis looked to Alabama for cabinet representation,
Walker was the third choice. (The two most prominent politicians of the state, Yancey and Clement C. Clay, declined Davis’s
invitation.) The appointment was a shaky one, as Walker had little military experience, and Davis was determined to start
micromanaging the war effort from day one.

In Montgomery the business of the Confederacy was established at the Government Building, a two-story brick edifice standing
on Bibb and Commerce streets, within a block of the Exchange Hotel. It was, thus, near where most officials were staying and
convenient to those who came downtown to seek office, of which there were many. But the Government Building was not the most
attractive of structures. (It appeared as “a great red brick pile” to one observer and “a handsome, first-class warehouse”
to another.)
¹
Nonetheless, Walker established his office of war to greet the arrivals of hundreds of army officers and would-be officers
from all parts of the country. Veterans of the U.S. Army with loyalty to the South—P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston,
and Edmund Kirby Smith included—flocked to see Walker. Indian fighters, including the celebrated officers Earl Van Dorn and
Ben McCulloch, also showed up. Soldiers of fortune traveled to Montgomery and offered their services to the Confederacy, including
escapees from military adventurer William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibustering journey and from the Hungarian revolution of the
late 1840s.

Following Fort Sumter’s bombardment and surrender by the Yankees, tens of thousands of Southern boys flocked to recruiting
stations in scattered towns, anxious for a fight. The men holding these boys’ fate represented a mixture of skill and incompetence,
some experienced general officers and others glamorized clerks. The War Department’s nine bureaus all operated under the direction
of Walker, but each bureau chief had considerable authority of his own. The most important of these bureaus was the Adjutant
and Inspector General’s Department, run by Samuel Cooper. A Yankee who had married a Southern girl, Cooper was a native of
Hackensack, New Jersey, and was past his prime at sixty-two when the war started. As adjutant and inspector general of the
army, Cooper would be the chief communicator between armies in the field and the Davis administration.

A long-standing veteran of the U.S. Army, Cooper had graduated in the West Point class of 1815 and spent most of his service
as an artillerist before becoming a staff officer. He served ably in the Seminole and Mexican wars, after which he was made
adjutant general of the U.S. Army, rising to the grade of colonel in the regular army. In 1827 Cooper married Sarah Mason,
granddaughter of George Mason of Virginia, a celebrated statesman of the Revolution. This alliance made Cooper a social force
in the South and a dedicated Virginian, living on an estate near Alexandria. He became fast friends with Jefferson Davis during
the latter’s term as secretary of war, an association that would carry over into the Confederacy’s struggle for independence,
and he joined an intellectual circle that included Robert E. Lee of Arlington House, a significant estate near Cooper’s own.
Cooper was notable also for his treatises on regulations for the volunteer and militia army troops and for his manual of cavalry
tactics. With his earnest yet unremarkable eyes, wavy gray hair, and plain face with its bulbous nose—coupled with a slow,
methodical way of thinking—Cooper quickly came to be thought of as a rubber stamp for Davis. One of his subordinates described
him as “uniformly courteous and uniformly non-committal . . . self-effacing, something of a mystery.”

Cooper had resigned his commission in the U.S. Army on March 7, 1861, just after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as president.
Cooper might have simply returned to Alexandria to live out his retirement years, but the second aspect of his defection from
the North was to go South, offering his services to the fledgling Confederate army. This offer led to Cooper becoming the
ranking officer of the entire Confederate army: its senior general. His catapult to the top was, in part, thanks to his relationship
with Jefferson Davis. During the days of Cooper as adjutant general and Davis as war secretary, Davis recalled, “my intercourse
with him was daily, and I habitually consulted him in reference to the duties I had to perform, as well because of the purity
of his character, as of his knowledge of the officers and affairs of the army.” Continued Davis,

Though calm in his manner and charitable in his feelings, he was a man of great native force, and [he] had a supreme scorn
for all that was mean. To such a man, a life spent in the army could not fail to have had its antagonisms and friendships.
. . . The Confederate States had no military organization, and save the patriotic hearts of gallant men, had little on which
to rely for the defense of their country. The experience and special knowledge of General Cooper was, under these circumstances,
of incalculable value.
²

Aside from the adjutant general’s office, the chief bureau immediately involved with War Secretary Walker was the Bureau of
War, also known as the war office, which consisted of clerks and messengers who assisted the secretary. The Bureau, as it
would be known, was led by a curious fellow named Albert Taylor Bledsoe. Age fifty-two, a regular army castoff who dabbled
in theology, Bledsoe was a friend and Kentucky classmate of both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee’s at West Point. After
West Point Bledsoe taught mathematics at Miami University in Ohio and then moved to Springfield, Illinois, where he had taken
up practicing law next door to another young attorney, Abraham Lincoln. Later Bledsoe taught math at the University of Mississippi
and the University of Virginia before emerging into the infant Confederacy, where he was famous for his hatred of all things
Northern and his vitriolic diatribes against Thomas Jefferson and democracy.

One clerk in the War Department was John B. Jones, age fifty-one, a Baltimore writer whose
Wild Western Scenes
had sold 100,000 copies in 1841. The father of a large family, he made the journey southward seeking employment in the War
Department after publishing the
Southern Monitor
in Philadelphia, a weekly that espoused Southern rights. Jones met President Davis on May 17 in Montgomery and described
him as being “overwhelmed with papers.” After introducing himself, Jones scrutinized the president during their brief interview.
Davis was “tall, nearly six feet; his frame is very slight and seemingly frail; but when he throws back his shoulders he is
as straight as an Indian chief. The features of his face are distinctly marked with character,” Jones continued, “and no one
gazing at his profile would doubt for a moment that he beheld more than an ordinary man.”
³

Two days later Jones visited Secretary Walker, who told the visitor he needed significant help with his correspondence. Walker
was “some forty-seven or forty-eight years of age,” he penned,

tall, thin, and a little bent; not by age, but by study and bad health. He was a successful lawyer, and never having been
in governmental employment, is fast working himself down. He has not yet learned how to avoid unnecessary labor; being a man
of the finest sensibilities, and exacting with the utmost nicety all due deference to the dignity of his official position.
. . . The only hope of his continuance in office is unconditional submission to the president, who, being once Secretary of
War of the United States, is familiar with all the wheels of the department.

Jones offered to accept a clerkship for relatively scant pay, telling Walker he desired “employment and facilities to preserve
interesting facts for publication.”
⁴

The Confederate Quartermaster-General’s Department, charged with providing matériel of war to the troops, got off to a rocky
start thanks to its leader, Abraham Charles Myers. Age fifty and a native of Charleston, South Carolina—a descendant of the
city’s first rabbi—Myers was a particularly poor choice for this position. A West Point graduate, Myers had served as a quartermaster
on frontier duty and in the Mexican War, after which he moved to New Orleans and served as a quartermaster there. Resigning
his old post at the outset of hostilities, Myers quickly proved unable to cope with the demands of supplying Confederate troops—his
miscalculations about supplying uniforms and nonordnance equipment upset numerous officers throughout the army. He fell out
of favor with the president almost immediately. Nonetheless, he had many influential friends. He was also the son-in-law of
David E. Twiggs, the U.S. brevet major general who had abandoned the Military Department of Texas to Confederate authorities.
Myers initially bolstered the nightlife among Confederates, as his wife, Marian, considered herself a social superior to Varina
Davis and set out to prove it via parties and receptions.