CHAPTER FOUR

A Shot in the Dark

World take good notice, silver stars have vanished;

Orbs now of scarlet—mortal coals, all aglow,

Dots of molten iron, wakeful and ominous,

On the blue bunting henceforth appear.

—WALT WHITMAN,

“Rise, Lurid Stars” (manuscript fragment, 1861)

Charleston Harbor, April 1861

AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN, a single shell announced the war’s beginning.

Something flashed and boomed suddenly ashore. In the fort, men keeping watch saw the projectile coming toward them, arcing clean and high, like a small comet tracing its course among the scattered stars. The night was so still that they could hear—or so they would later tell—the hissing sound it made as it cut through the air. A spray of sparks trailed from the fuse, reflected on the rippled water below, so that not one but two streaks of orange fire seemed to race across the harbor, converging and converging. The ball burst at last above them, right over the ring of parapets, a hundred pounds of metal blown apart from within. Perfectly aimed. An instant of sudden clarity illuminated the bricks, stones, and panes of quivering glass; the silent iron guns; and the flag that hung, barely stirring, on its tall staff.¹

Darkness and stillness again. That first shot had been one gun’s signal to the others. Out across the water, all around the harbor, unseen cannons and mortars were being carefully adjusted and aimed. Then the enemy’s full barrage began.

AFTER SO MANY MONTHS of waiting, the standoff at Sumter had been broken finally by an ancient law of siege warfare: the fort’s defenders were being starved out. Major Anderson had been left with 128 mouths to feed—the officers and soldiers themselves, plus several dozen civilian laborers who had remained in the citadel—and precious little to give them. Over the past four weeks, the few remaining barrels of hardtack had dwindled away to mere crumbs, as had the flour, sugar, and coffee. Back in February, a singular piece of bad luck had befallen the fort’s supply of rice: a cannon saluting Washington’s Birthday smashed a window and sprayed the food store with splinters of glass. By early April, the men were sifting through that rice grain by grain. Each one represented another morsel of time.²

Grain by grain, that precious commodity, too, had been running out for the Union, and for peace.

Almost every morning throughout the four-month siege, a mail boat from Charleston had brought a bundle of newspapers out to the fort. These usually included the latest edition of the Charleston Mercury, with its banner headlines screaming blood and secession, as well as a grab bag of recent Northern papers forwarded by the men’s families back home. Every day, Anderson and his officers pored over these papers, seeking clues to their own fate. For more than six weeks after their arrival at Sumter they had waited out the protracted, ever-feebler death twitches of the Buchanan administration. Then in late February, papers had started coming with reports on the president-elect and his journey to the capital. They had read Lincoln’s speeches closely, noting how he seemed to change his mind at each new stop. Their naïve, inexperienced new commander-in-chief was obviously no more resolute a leader than Buchanan, and perhaps even less so.

“The truth is we are the government at present,” lamented Dr. Crawford, the fort’s surgeon. “It rests upon the points of our swords. Shall we use our position to deluge the country in blood?”³

The garrison was in a bizarre position of both power and powerlessness. On the one hand, as Crawford realized, they could at will, with a single cannon shot, change the course of American history. On the other hand, Fort Sumter, which had looked so commanding and impregnable from the sandy ramparts of Moultrie, was beginning to feel less and less so. On all sides of the harbor, they could see new artillery platforms under construction, cannons being wheeled into place, and in the distance bayonets glinting as if in Morse code, as recruits marched and countermarched on the beach. Each day, Captain Doubleday looked across the harbor at the hundreds of tiny figures moving busily over the dunes of Sullivan’s Island: slaves whose Confederate masters had brought them from their plantations to assist in constructing earthworks. Anderson expressed it for most in the garrison when he wrote that he felt like “a sheep tied watching the butcher sharpening a knife to cut his throat.”⁴

Worse even than the growing menace from Charleston was the uncanny silence from Washington.

Since its occupation of Sumter, the garrison had received no orders from the War Department except to stay firm, maintain a strictly defensive stance, and do nothing that might provoke bloodshed. As soon as President Lincoln was inaugurated, the men awaited a more decisive message. Would they be directed to abandon it, as many people, even old General Scott, were suggesting? Would reinforcements be sent to defend it, or at least provisions to sustain it as the still bloodless secession crisis continued to unfold?⁵

Days turned into weeks, and still no message came. Anderson and his men speculated endlessly about which course of action Lin-coln would choose. There was something to be said for—and against—each one.

Republican hard-liners in the North, they knew, wanted Lincoln to send more troops to Charleston Harbor. With the entire world watching, many Americans thought it insane to entrust the nation’s military prestige, and perhaps even its destiny, to just a few dozen soldiers. Yet experienced tacticians like Anderson and his senior staff knew that with Southern troops massing by the thousands in Charleston, a foray by the North would likely end in bloody disaster. Several days before the inauguration, Anderson asked each of his officers to estimate, independently, how large an expeditionary force it would take to seize the rebel batteries and break the siege. Doubleday said ten thousand men, backed by a naval attack. Captain Seymour simply replied that he thought a large-scale reinforcement was “virtually impossible.” The major himself concluded it would require at least twenty thousand soldiers—more than the number in the entire United States Army, which was then scattered among the frontier outposts of the West. In any event, a large-scale collision at Charleston was certain to bring on full civil war.⁶

An attempt to deliver fresh provisions to Anderson’s men might well end likewise in failure and humiliation. In the months since the garrison’s surprise move to Sumter, no ship under the U.S. flag had been permitted to approach, and the rebels had turned Charleston Harbor into a potentially deadly trap for any foolish enough to try. They had sunk hulks at the harbor’s mouth, turning the already narrow channel into a tortuous maze navigable only by daylight with a local pilot’s aid—certainly no sizable naval squadron could get through. Even if a supply ship did manage to slip in and anchor at Sumter, it would almost certainly be smashed to splinters by the enemy’s heavy land-based artillery, assuming it was not first intercepted by the rebel patrol vessels, camouflaged black against the night, now prowling the harbor round the clock.⁷

The Southerners had made it clear that they would not hesitate to fire even at an unarmed vessel. Back in January, General Scott had chartered a private steamship, Star of the West, to bring a few fresh troops and supplies to the Sumter garrison, hoping that the enemy would take it for a harmless merchantman. Word of its true mission slipped out—in fact, it made headlines in Northern newspapers—and by the time it arrived at Charleston the rebels were ready at their guns, sending the Star fleeing ignominiously amid a badly aimed but still alarming barrage of iron balls. (Inside Sumter, an officer’s wife almost set off the war three months early when she seized the lanyard of a loaded cannon, intending to fire back at the rebel battery, but a quick-thinking Doubleday stayed her hand.) And at the beginning of April, the clueless captain of a New England merchant schooner—he didn’t read newspapers much and had only a vague idea of some sort of trouble between the North and South—came bobbing innocently into the harbor with his cargo of ice, the Stars and Stripes flapping from his masthead. It was only after a cannonball tore through the Rhoda B. Shannon’s mainsail that he swung her round rather hard and ran for the open sea. Anderson and his men watched with gritted teeth. It took every inch of their self-restraint to see their flag insulted with impunity, practically beneath the muzzles of their impotent guns. But they knew that if they responded to the rebels’ provocation, this, too, would likely end in civil war.⁸

As a last resort, the Lincoln administration could simply let the rebels have Sumter, along with Fort Pickens, the only other significant stronghold in the South that remained in federal hands. Shameful as this might seem, it would be only the latest in a succession of bloodless Union surrenders. Since the fall of Pinckney and Moultrie at the end of December, forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other federal assets across the South had tumbled like pawns, one by one. In Florida, state troops had seized an arsenal that held almost a million rifle and musket cartridges and fifty thousand pounds of gunpowder. In Louisiana, U.S. officials meekly handed over the New Orleans mint and customs house, and with them $599,303 in gold and silver coin. In Texas, General David Twiggs, a native Georgian and stout veteran of both the 1812 and Mexican wars, made only a token demurral before bestowing all federal forts and armaments in the state upon a ragtag coterie of irregulars who had marched into San Antonio under the Lone Star flag. (Twiggs would be dismissed from the U.S. Army for treason—in absentia, since by then he had already joined that of the Confederate States.) Next to these rich prizes, Fort Sumter was of negligible value to the Confederacy—a small sacrifice, it would appear, in exchange for staving off “the horrors of a fratricidal war,” as Major Anderson put it in one of his dispatches. More time might still buy a peaceful compromise with the South. More time might permit the Union to prepare itself for war as the Confederacy was doing, assembling munitions and volunteers.⁹

This last course of action, peaceful surrender, was the one that nearly all of Sumter’s officers and men—and its commander—expected Lincoln ultimately to choose. Anderson felt that he had honorably held the fort throughout the worst of the secession mania. Now, he wrote to a friend, tempers in the seceding states would gradually cool, and, barring any rash federal action, “our errant sisters, thus leaving us as friends, may at some future time be won back by conciliation and justice.” There would be no disgrace in lowering his flag to the forces of secession, now that the mob of local roughnecks shaking their fists at Moultrie in December had become a well-equipped army of seven thousand men, commanded by one of the ablest siege tacticians in America, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. In fact, the dapper little Louisianan had studied artillery technique at West Point under no less an authority than Major Anderson himself, and the two men had remained warm friends.¹⁰

It was the most gentlemanly of sieges. Arriving in Charleston at the beginning of March, Beauregard had sent several cases of cigars and fine brandy over to Anderson as tokens of his undiminished esteem. (Anderson, mindful as ever of military etiquette, promptly returned them untouched.) When the two commanders had occasion to exchange messages, their notes were addressed “My dear General” and “My dear Major.” A sympathetic lady of Charleston sent over a bouquet of early-blooming Carolina jasmine whose scent delighted the men, reminding them of “the woods and freedom,” the surgeon Crawford wrote.¹¹

South Carolina’s governor, Francis Pickens, was not quite so courtly and obliging, but he did allow the garrison at Sumter to communicate with the outside world, with almost no interference. Visitors came and went, including one of Mathew Brady’s photographers, who assembled Anderson and his officers for a group portrait. The daily mail boat from town brought confidential communiqués from the War Department inquiring about the military situation. It brought letters and small packages from home, and a large crate of prime-quality tobacco from an admiring merchant in New York. (Anderson did not send this back.) It brought requests from men and women all over the North for autographs, photos, and locks of hair, which the officers did their best to supply. It even brought emissaries from Washington: White House aides and War Department adjutants, interviewing, inspecting, inquiring, but offering no instructions. Beauregard and the Carolinians allowed these envoys to pass, believing that their reports would only hasten Lincoln’s inevitable decision to surrender the fort peacefully.¹²

One day, the boat brought Mrs. Anderson. Worried by the lack of mail from her husband, the major’s wife had traveled by train from New York to see him, and received permission from the rebel authorities because, as Doubleday wryly put it, “she had many influential relatives among the Secessionists.” She stayed only two hours, barely long enough to assure herself that her husband was safe and to take a meal together, but with her had come another visitor who would remain for three months. Peter Hart, a tough former sergeant, had accompanied the major as his orderly all through the Mexican War. Remembering her husband’s fondness for him, the resourceful Eba Anderson had decided to track him down. She found Hart serving as a New York City policeman in a remote district of Upper Manhattan—just above Twenty-sixth Street—and somehow persuaded him to join the defenders at Sumter. The rebels refused to let Hart stay, but Mrs. Anderson not being a lady to take no for an answer, they finally assented, on the condition of his word of honor not to fight as a soldier. This he gave, but he would still play an important role in the battle to come.¹³

Three essential things the boat from Charleston continually failed to bring: reinforcements, provisions, and orders from Washington.¹⁴

Back in December, as Doubleday’s boat approached Sumter on its night voyage from Moultrie, he had thought the new fortress resembled a prison. Now it had become one in fact. On bright days, the men played at ball and leapfrog on the parade ground, but sunlight was a rare and fleeting thing. Dusk came early and dawn late within the gloomy walls of encircling brick. During those long hours of darkness, there was no light to read or write by; nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and wait out the slowly passing hours. The damp, raw cold of late winter penetrated the masonry and the men’s bones. Coal and firewood were running short along with the food and candles, and a guard was placed over the dwindling supply. The soldiers fished out passing driftwood to burn, before they began tearing down some of the fort’s outbuildings for fuel. Still, they could barely keep themselves warm. Doubleday sacrificed a handsome mahogany table that he had carried with him from his well-appointed quarters at Moultrie.¹⁵

Amid this gloom and tedium, the men worked to shore up the fort’s defenses. Sumter, created decades before to withstand an attack on Charleston by a foreign fleet, had been designed with its strongest bastions overlooking the main shipping channel and with the weakest flank, known as the gorge wall, directly facing the nearest land, Cummings Point, just twelve hundred yards distant. This rear flank was where, for safety’s sake, the engineers had placed the main gate, hospital, and ordnance room. Now, with the enemy’s guns on Cummings Point, Sumter’s occupants must have wished they could lift up the entire fortress and rotate it 180 degrees. They had to make do instead with walling off the main gate with brick and stone, mounting howitzers above it, and constructing shrapnel-proof barriers in front of the fragile buildings. The Confederates, they expected, would try to storm the fort from this side. Captain Seymour, an inveterate tinkerer, devised makeshift weapons to drop on the attackers’ heads: barrels, charged with gunpowder and loaded with paving stones, that would explode like giant grenades as they hit the ground. Every so often, the harbor echoed with booms as one side or the other tested its heavy guns, and one morning a live round, fired mistakenly by an onshore battery, crashed into the water just off Sumter’s wharf. The Confederates hastily sent an officer over to apologize.¹⁶

While Sumter might have seemed at times like an island without a country—neither Northern nor Southern, Union nor Confederate—its occupants were nevertheless constantly reminded that they were situated in the middle of slave territory. The Union officers even had their own slave, a lively and bright teenager named James, whom they had rented from his master in Charleston to serve as their factotum around the fort and to run small errands in the city. James became a cause of contention—and of a rare breach of decorum between besiegers and besieged—when he failed to return from one of these errands. The officers soon learned that his master had seized him and was refusing to give him back, in violation of the rental agreement, because James, who was apparently literate, had exchanged letters with his mother about a possible slave uprising. In a letter to Major Anderson, a South Carolina official rudely suggested that the boy’s “temper and principles” had clearly been corrupted by exposure to the Yankee degenerates at Sumter—an insult that brought Anderson nearly to the point of challenging the man to a duel.¹⁷

For the most part, though, quiet reigned. The excitement of December and January—when Anderson’s men had expected a Southern assault at any moment and were ready, even eager, to fight—had given way to a surreal calm, a stasis that seemed as if it might last forever, with the little band of soldiers fixed eternally on a point around which history’s wheel would continue to turn, never touching them.

In some ways, the nine officers formed a microcosm of the Union itself, with men representing almost every region and every political orientation in the country, including one young Virginia lieutenant who later, when his state seceded, ended up switching sides, fighting—and dying—in the Confederate service. They also included a wide range of personalities. The officer corps of the “Old Army,” as the career military would be fondly remembered after the war, was a kind of men’s club, a close-knit, sometimes affectionate, often rambunctious fraternity. You started at West Point before you could shave, and then worked your way through the ranks, flying hither and thither among states and territories at the mysterious whim of the War Department, until you were a grizzled pensioner—unless, of course, a Mexican bullet or a Comanche arrow found you first. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and a single moment of glory or disgrace—whether on the battlefield or the dueling ground, in the barroom or the brothel—could seal an officer’s reputation, and his fate. In many respects, though, a spirit of tolerant worldliness prevailed. The Old Army was one of antebellum America’s few truly national institutions, and certainly the only one that required the sons of Georgia planters to bunk alongside those of New England schoolteachers, not to mention do daily business (peaceably or not, as circumstances might require) with Mormon emigrants and Sonoran bandits. “I have in my pilgrimage thus far found mankind nearly the same in every region,” Major Anderson once reflected. There was room for many kinds of men around the officers’ mess table—and Sumter’s was no exception.¹⁸

Abner Doubleday, the garrison’s blunt-spoken second in command, hailed from Auburn, New York, the antislavery Republican heartland, where his fellow townsfolk included William H. Seward and Harriet Tubman. The bulldoggish captain was used to being regarded as slightly eccentric, both for his radical politics and for his metaphysical turn of mind—neither of these being quite standard issue at West Point. He pored over Spanish poetry, theories of the afterlife, and transcendentalist essays—years earlier, in fact, as a freshly minted lieutenant, he had written Emerson a swoony fan letter, inviting the philosopher, whom he had never met, to come and stay for a visit at the fort where he was stationed off the coast of Maine, “my quarters being large for a bachelor.”¹⁹ But Doubleday could also be entertaining company. He had a boyish love of practical jokes and coarse anecdotes that could relieve the often dreary life of an army outpost—it took little prodding for him to regale his messmates with the story of General Kearney, General Sumner, the Irish cook, and the watermelon; or the one about Secretary Floyd’s encounter with the Sioux Indian chief; or of how Lieutenant Tom Jackson—not yet known as Stonewall—got fleeced by a horse trader back at Fort Hamilton.²⁰

The captain’s connection to Cooperstown and the legend that he invented baseball are equally specious, alas. Versions of the game existed long before his birth, and Doubleday himself would mention baseball just once in any of his surviving writings: in 1871, while in command of a fort in Texas, he would ask the War Department for permission to purchase bats and balls for the members of a colored infantry regiment at the post. (This request was apparently denied.)²¹ In a certain respect, however, it made sense for a later generation of Americans to associate the sport with a famously tenacious Union officer. Baseball was just coming into its own as the Civil War began—the first reference to it as a national pastime dates from 1856—and Americans associated it with some of the same ideas that were percolating through the political culture of the era, ideas that they would also come to associate strongly with the Northern cause. (Indeed, one political cartoon in 1860 showed Lincoln preparing to hit a home run, with a fence rail inscribed Equal Rights and Free Territory as his bat, and the words Wide Awake on his belt.) Writers praised it as a “manly” game, one that inculcated principles of self-reliance and free competition perfectly suited to “our go-ahead people.” They promoted it as a “national institution” that could unite Americans in every region. In New York, where the baseball craze truly took off, an 1857 Herald article exhorted: “Let us have base ball clubs organized … all over the country, rivaling in their beneficent effects the games of Roman and Grecian republics.” Perhaps the enlisted men at Sumter did play baseball—Crawford’s diary records them as “playing ball,” without further specifics—but even so, a career officer like Doubleday would almost certainly have considered it inappropriate to join them.²²

Doubleday may have been the garrison’s champion raconteur, but it was Crawford, the surgeon, who would eventually provide the most detailed account of life inside Sumter. As a medical man, Crawford had attended not West Point but rather the University of Pennsylvania, in his native state. After nearly a decade in the army, he still brought the eye of an outsider, and of a scientist, to bear on things around him. From the beginning of the crisis he had been taking meticulous daily notes—with an eye toward not only history but also the literary marketplace. “It will be a book eagerly sought after, I think, and would certainly pay,” he wrote to his brother more than a month before the Confederate attack. “Two different firms have applied.” An accomplished draftsman, the surgeon (like Captain Seymour) also made sketches of the fort and sold them by mail to Harper’s Weekly for the handsome sum of $25 apiece. Crawford was ambitious, self-assured, and rather vain, sporting a pair of magnificent side-whiskers that hung down over his epaulettes like Spanish moss on a stately oak. Moreover, he craved fame not just as a litterateur, but also as a warrior, making no secret of the fact that he would happily trade his scalpel for a saber.²³ Like Doubleday, he was also quite open about his politics—though unlike his fellow officer, his time in the South had made him sympathetic to the slaveholders, and he blamed the Union’s current predicament on the sentimental foolishness of Northern abolitionists.²⁴

Truman Seymour, a Vermont preacher’s son, was a man of a very different stamp. Dark-eyed and ruminative, with thick hair swept back from his forehead in Byronic fashion, he seemed at first more like an artist or poet than a warrior. Indeed, Captain Seymour was a fine watercolorist—a painter of precise, delicately hued landscapes—had taught draftsmanship for several years at West Point, and had recently taken a year’s leave from the army to roam across Europe and commune with the works of Titian, Rubens, and Veronese. During his rare sojourns at home in New England, he loved to hike the Green Mountains with his sketchpad and brushes, fascinated not just by the misty peaks but by the complicated geology beneath them, which he had begun studying seriously as a teenager. Like them, Seymour concealed a stony core beneath a luxuriant exterior: while still a boy lieutenant, he had been brevetted twice for gallantry in Mexico, and later fought in Florida during the army’s ruthless final campaign against the Seminoles. With little of the bellicose swagger affected by Doubleday and even Crawford, he was perhaps a better soldier than either: the kind who viewed the garrison’s predicament at Sumter not as a hopeless cause, nor as a chance at patriotic glory, but as a logistical puzzle to be solved with cool ingenuity.²⁵

Ultimately, however, Sumter’s fate would depend on the man whose inmost thoughts were the most illegible.

For months after Major Anderson’s arrival at Charleston, the skeptical Doubleday had done his best to get inside the new commander’s head. He had observed the pious Kentuckian intently, tried to draw out his opinions, and even baited him on the subject of slavery. Anderson confessed he was disgusted by the North’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and quoted the Bible to demonstrate that God himself had ordained human bondage. Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a swivel gun and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, “and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.” Anderson, he later boasted, was unable to counter his merciless logical volley. (A less tolerant superior might have clapped the captain in irons.)²⁶ Had Doubleday been slightly more sensitive, he might have realized that Anderson’s reliance on revealed truth was no mere rhetorical strategy. Rather, it bespoke a profound discomfort with earthly affairs, a preference to render unto Caesar.

There was a brittleness to Anderson, Doubleday noticed—almost, it sometimes seemed, a kind of fragility. The strain and uncertainty were clearly taking a mental and physical toll on the major: soon there were a pallor to the man’s skin and a dullness to his eyes and, abandoning his long-accustomed reticence, he began sharing his private opinions almost recklessly. In conversations around the officers’ mess table, he blamed secession on the North, and confessed that if he were in charge in Washington, he would promptly surrender all the Southern forts. He could never take up arms against the Stars and Stripes, he said, but if his native state of Kentucky left the Union, he would be sorely tempted to do likewise—that is, resign his commission and move to some quiet corner of Europe.²⁷

Was this a man to be trusted with the most delicate military assignment in American history? Certainly not, Doubleday had thought at first. In an act of plain insubordination, he had even managed to convey his misgivings directly to the new commander-in-chief. The previous autumn, Doubleday had begun sending frank letters about the situation at Charleston, written in a private code, to his brother Ulysses. Ulysses, a Republican campaign operative in New York City, then decoded them and sent them on to the candidate Lincoln and other “leaders of public opinion” across the North. Some of the early dispatches went so far as to hint that Anderson might soon show his true colors as a secessionist traitor.²⁸

Yet there were facets to the new commander that Doubleday did not immediately appreciate. One of these was Anderson’s deeply felt sense of honor and duty—a quality apparent in the move from Moultrie to Sumter.

Another, which revealed itself more slowly, was Anderson’s hatred of war itself. Carnage sickened him, and he had already witnessed far too much in the course of his career. As a young officer in the struggle against Chief Black Hawk in Illinois, he had watched helplessly as the local settler militia, berserk for Indian blood, massacred unarmed civilians; had seen and smelled the emaciated bodies of women and children left rotting by the road under an August sun. He had rescued a four-year-old Indian girl, maimed by a musket ball, from beneath the corpse of her dead mother. He had beheld senseless misery, he wrote then to his brother, “exceeding any I ever expected to see in our happy land.”²⁹ He had prayed God to spare his country from enduring the like ever again.

It was to peace that Anderson was most loyal, Doubleday began to realize. The major’s experiences of war, his piety, and his staunch conservatism all committed him to preserving the Union—and not in name alone, but the Union as only a politically innocent man could conceive it: a Union without sectional strife, without secessionists, without abolitionists. Without even North and South, perhaps. Civil war, disunion, radicalism: these were anathema to every fiber of Anderson’s being. Eventually Doubleday began to feel sympathy, verging on admiration, for his commander. “I feel deeply for him,” he wrote in February. “I consider him an honorable and brave man [and] as much as we differ in the propriety of some of his acts, I have a high respect for him as a man and as an officer.”³⁰

All those in the fort had come to detest what they called the secessionist “madmen.” But most had little more love, if any, for the incoming Republican administration. On March 4, a few hours after Lincoln had taken the oath of office, Dr. Crawford wrote to his brother back home in Pennsylvania: “A vulgar, third rate politician, a man without anything to entitle him to the position he holds, an uncouth Western Hoosier is now our President.… How any party could have … elected [such] a character as the present rail splitter is more than a mystery to me. He is however under the control of Mr. Seward almost entirely and from that single circumstance I permit myself to hope for the best.”³¹

From the Northern newspapers that came on the daily mail boat, the men at Sumter knew that they had become famous. On distant Broadway, P. T. Barnum’s “Museum” was staging “Union Drama, Anderson and Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” which spectacle filled the house twice daily at twenty-five cents a ticket. (A tall, handsome actor named J. H. Clark played Doubleday, who was portrayed—not without some justice—as the most warlike among the “Patriots,” itching to unleash the fury of Sumter’s cannons upon the rebels.) During the long hours of standing watch or supervising work on the fortifications, the junior officers whiled away their time in idle speculation about how their grateful country would eventually reward their heroism—heroism that, of course, had not yet included firing or withstanding a single shot. Crawford thought that the War Department should confer on each of them a brevet promotion in rank and pay grade. Doubleday actually designed a medal for Congress to bestow upon the garrison’s members, depicting the evacuation of Fort Moultrie on one side and the word Fidelity on the other.³²

Fidelity was a virtue all too rare in America that winter. Newspapers from the North also brought reports of a steady exodus of career military men resigning from the army to join the Confederate forces. These defections came as personal blows to the men at Sumter. “We cannot repress the sadness that comes over us when we see one by one of our old comrades dropping away, men with whom we have [shared] many a bivouac in the far distant frontier,” Crawford wrote in his diary. “How are we to regard them as our enemies now?”³³

On that same day, March 6, came word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech, with its pledge to “hold, occupy, and possess” the Southern forts. Across Charleston Harbor, a new flag unfurled above the city, alongside the familiar palmetto banner. From Sumter’s ramparts, it looked at first, confusingly, like the defenders’ own flag, “the one flag we longed to see,” as Doubleday called it. But as they took turns with the spyglass, they got their first good look: three broad red and white stripes and a circle of seven stars—the banner of the new Confederate nation.³⁴ From that moment on, the garrison’s position felt even less tenable than before.

The officers and men at Sumter put little stock in Lincoln’s rhetoric—let alone in the bluster of Republicans across the North who said the fort must be defended. Its ultimate fate could hardly be in doubt. Anderson had shared with the War Department the estimates of how many troops would be required to hold or resupply his post, and neither the major nor his subordinates could believe that elder statesmen like Secretary Seward and General Scott would approve a doomed mission that would lead inexorably to internecine war. Fort Sumter, Crawford wrote to his brother, “must be given up and the sooner the administration appreciate this the better. All this talk of ‘occupying, holding, and possessing’ the forts is nonsense. There is neither Army enough to do it, nor is it likely there soon will be.” If it were up to him, he said bitterly, he would simply blow up the fort and leave the accursed harbor forever—and then, like Anderson, depart for Europe rather than remain in the “rump” of his former country. Yet even at the same time Crawford pined for escape, he expressed, paradoxically, an oddly sentimental attachment to the place, as if Sumter itself were the last remaining shred of the nation that he had loved and served: “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at the thought of leaving this fort, where every stone and surrounding is so impressed upon my heart.” By the middle of March, both Northern and Southern newspapers were reporting confidently that evacuation was imminent, with some even announcing that the orders had been signed by the president and were on their way to Anderson. Meanwhile, the surgeon attended to his routine tasks, dutifully dispensing medicines and filing sick reports. As March drew to a close, he was treating one case of asthma, three of bronchitis, one of syphilis. Dysentery was spreading quickly, to no one’s surprise.³⁵

By the first days of April, the men were packing up their belongings for what they assumed was their impending departure. Crawford stowed away most of his medical supplies. Captain John G. Foster, the fort’s chief engineer, even wrote to a friend serving with the Confederate forces across the harbor, telling him (“strictly entre nous”) that he regretted having to leave without saying good-bye, and making arrangements to return a borrowed mustard spoon. Major Anderson had larger concerns. He agonized ceaselessly about the lack of orders from Washington. Within a week, he knew, the last crumbs of food would be utterly exhausted. At any time, he might simply send a polite request to Beauregard, and the officers and men under his command would be escorted to safety, rescued from the pointless siege. Yet he was ever conscious of his honor. In a letter to the War Department on April 5, he pleaded not to be “left without instructions,” adding bitterly: “After thirty odd years of service I do not wish it to be said that I have treasonably abandoned a post and turned over to unauthorized persons public property entrusted to my charge. I am entitled to this act of justice at the hands of my Government.”

In his heart, though, Anderson was no longer certain he could expect even this. Not from the new commander-in-chief, the dangerous fanatic who had brought the country to such a terrible pass. If only the nation had a soldier at its head once more: a General Jackson, a General Harrison, a General Taylor, even a General Pierce! Instead, it had a party hack whose only armed service had been as a militiaman in the Black Hawk War, at the head of one of those bumpkin companies that Anderson had so despised. (Anderson probably did not recall that on May 29, 1832, he had personally mustered the future president into temporary U.S. Army service as a rank private.)³⁶

Spring should have arrived, but still the winter lingered. On April 8, the men awoke to a damp chill. Wind and rain swept the bleak waters of the harbor. Yet on all sides of the fort, things seemed suddenly different. The familiar patrol boats that had passed continuously at a distance now hovered nearby hour after hour. Other vessels were landing men and matériel near the rebels’ newly constructed artillery battery on Cummings Point. Toward midmorning, a sudden boom came from the opposite side of the harbor, at the tip of Sullivan’s Island, near Moultrie, and Sumter’s startled sentries looked through their spyglasses to see a large wooden house explode into splinters. As the cloud of dust drifted into the misty air, they could make out something glinting beyond it, brutal and metallic: the blunt-nosed muzzles of four heavy cannons. The Confederates had unmasked yet another battery, one that they had been constructing in secret. It was brilliantly placed, allowing them to rake the fort’s principal bastions from both sides, to dominate the only spot where a friendly ship might have anchored, and to fire directly into Sumter’s uppermost tier, where Anderson had placed his heaviest artillery, the only weapons that might pose a serious threat to the enemy’s fortifications. Now any men who attempted to work those guns would be cut to pieces by flying metal within minutes. General Beauregard had checkmated his old professor.³⁷

The most marked change to be observed on that dispiriting morning was in the major himself. The officers were not privy to his official correspondence with Washington, but for days they had noticed Anderson’s usual stoicism sinking into depression. He seemed even grayer and more melancholy than ever, as if oppressed by some new and secret care.

The following day brought a sudden change in the weather, a strange new portent—and an explanation. The ninth of April dawned fine and clear. Against the rooftops of the city, three miles distant, a fresh skyline seemed to blossom as hundreds of sails unfurled along Charleston’s wharves. Not long afterward, the men at Sumter watched the departing armada pass them: more than forty merchant ships running free before the northwest breeze toward open water, their sails like so many white petals, each curled edge sharp against the blue. Charleston Harbor was left almost empty. “It was a beautiful sight I assure you,” wrote Crawford in his last letter to his brother, a letter that would never be delivered.³⁸

It was not many hours after this that Anderson gathered his officers and shared his private burden of almost two full days. He had received the long-awaited orders from Washington, in the form of a terse six-sentence communiqué from Simon Cameron, the new secretary of war. A relief expedition was already on its way with provisions and reinforcements. The garrison was to hold out, if at all possible, until its arrival. And Cameron conveyed a message from Lincoln himself: “It is not, however, the intention of the President to subject your command to any danger or hardship beyond what, in your judgment, would be usual in military life; and he has entire confidence that you will act as becomes a patriot and soldier, under all circumstances.”³⁹

At long last, the Kentuckian in the White House had made his wishes known to the Kentuckian in Fort Sumter. What unfolded in the coming days would depend, more than anything else, on these two men.

AS ANDERSON’S MEN were counting their crumbs one night during the last week of March, President and Mrs. Lincoln were hosting their first official dinner at the White House. Anxious about Washington protocol, they had sought the discreet coaching of Secretary Seward and his able staff—and by all accounts this initial Republican foray into formal entertaining was competent enough, if not exactly splendid. The gaslight and candles had been artfully arranged to conceal the State Dining Room’s shabbiness, and the air was perfumed by fresh spring blossoms in gilt-silver vases, a refreshing change from the artificial flowers preferred by the previous administration. Mrs. Lincoln appeared, arrayed in garish silk, her plump hand clutching a fan that she fluttered energetically—coquettishly, she seemed to think. William Howard Russell, the acerbic correspondent for the London Times, peered at her through his wire-rimmed spectacles, taking mental notes on every detail of this frontier queen’s curious mannerisms. (They were, he would tell his readers, “stiffened … by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer.”)

With the exception of Russell, the guest list was, as might have been expected, an unadventurous one: the entire cabinet was in attendance, seated stiffly in their drab frock coats like a conclave of Methodist parsons, their ranks enlivened only by twenty-one-year-old Kate Chase, the treasury secretary’s captivating daughter. The menu, too, was conservative: imported wines accompanied fish prepared à la française. In the end, it was the president himself who set his guests at ease, resting his bony elbows on the table and treating everyone to a comical yarn about a drunken Irish coachman he’d met in his days as a young lawyer riding the circuit.⁴⁰

Only one of the administration’s senior counselors was conspicuously absent: General Scott, the hero of 1812 and 1848, and typically a fixture at such occasions, his monumental bulk, gold-braided and brass-buttoned, making an impressive centerpiece at any Washington function. (Nor had Scott, whose appetite for good food and fine wine was almost as legendary as his martial exploits, ever been known to decline a dinner invitation.) The other guests awaited his appearance at table for some time—several of them had glimpsed him in the reception room as they came in—until finally word came that the general was indisposed. He had indeed come to the White House, everyone was told, but one of his myriad physical ills—known to include gout, rheumatism, and dropsy—had compelled him to retire to a guest bedroom upstairs for the remainder of the evening.⁴¹

This was untrue. Scott was, in fact, nowhere in the mansion. Nor was his decrepitude causing him more torment than usual. The general-in-chief’s indisposition was of a political nature.

Scott had come early, summoned by an urgent note from the president. Lincoln’s brief missive had not specifed the matter at hand, but Scott knew it must involve Forts Sumter and Pickens. Indeed, he assumed that the president was finally ready to discuss evacuation plans, a conversation the general had been awaiting with growing impatience. The day after the inauguration, he had informed Lincoln bluntly that any opportunity to reinforce Sumter had long passed, and that the only question was whether its garrison could be withdrawn before the rebels attacked. A few days later, Scott even took it upon himself to draft orders for the evacuation and forward them to the War Department pending the president’s final approval. Major Anderson and his men, he said, should leave Sumter literally as soon as they could find a boat to carry them.⁴²

Moreover, Scott knew that almost all of Lincoln’s other top advisors, as well as the heads of both major political parties in the North, shared his opinions. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic leader, had publicly endorsed evacuating Sumter. (He was also pushing a scheme to replace the old Union, at least temporarily, with a kind of North American free-trade zone stretching from Upper Canada to the Isthmus of Panama.) Seward, still considered chieftain of the Republican Party, was working more actively—and at times covertly—toward the same end. The secretary of state still believed that the Deep South might be coaxed and petted back into the Union, and, communicating through Southern intermediaries, he had continually assured Confederate authorities that Sumter would soon be in their hands, once even asking them to inform President Davis that the fort would be evacuated within three days. At cabinet meetings, nearly everyone sided with Seward: only Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general, consistently argued for reinforcement. Even as uncompromising a radical as Senator Sumner made it known he was ready to yield to the inevitable.⁴³

It was with much self-confidence, then—and not a little condescension—that General Scott met Lincoln before the first White House dinner. At six foot five and more than three hundred pounds, Scott was one of the few men in Washington who towered physically over the president. His opinion of his new commander-in-chief had never been especially high; back in November, he’d snorted that if he’d ever laid eyes on the former Illinois congressman during his brief stint in Washington, he certainly couldn’t recall it. Presidents might come and go—he had served eight of them in his years as general-in-chief—but the hero of Lundy’s Lane and Veracruz remained. Scott took it for granted, naturally, that he would steer the administration’s military policies himself. Now he barely gave Lincoln a chance to speak before he began lecturing the president about the Southern forts, and unfolded a memorandum on the subject he had penned earlier that day. Not only must Sumter obviously be evacuated, he said, but Fort Pickens as well. Such a gesture of magnanimity toward “our Southern friends,” Scott opined, would unquestionably keep the Upper South in the Union, and might even bring South Carolina and Florida back in. (Actually, the general was far from certain about this last part: in private letters and conversations with others, including Seward, he suggested that the loyal states would ultimately have to let their wayward sisters depart in peace.) He had, he added helpfully, asked his secretary to draw up detailed instructions for the withdrawals of troops. These he offered for the president’s approval.⁴⁴

But the president, far from thanking Scott for his wisdom and diligence, was turning pale with anger. The general’s plan, Lincoln told a confidant the next day, had given him “a cold shock.” Abandon Sumter and Pickens to the Confederates? Moreover, how dare he instruct the president on matters of statecraft? The old soldier had overstepped his bounds, blundering off the military path into the thickets of politics, an area that had never been his strong suit, to put it mildly. (Scott had run for president in 1852 on the Whig ticket; his prodigious ineptitude on the campaign trail had helped seal the party’s demise.)⁴⁵

In fact, Lincoln had summoned Scott to the White House to talk not about evacuating Sumter but about reinforcing it—and to tell the general to be ready to implement plans for sending in food and supplies. Anderson had “played us false,” the president snapped: the major, for reasons of his own, had been misleading his superiors about the true feasibility of holding on to the fort.⁴⁶ If Scott was not prepared to carry out his orders, Lincoln concluded coldly, he would find some other person who might do so.⁴⁷

The general, crimson-faced, stuffed his memorandum back into his tunic and hastily departed, stomping out of the White House just as the first guests were arriving for dinner. It had taken as great an insult as this to make Winfield Scott pass up a meal.

The president played the genial host to perfection that evening. But William H. Russell, the canny journalist, noticed how his homespun stories always seemed to serve some deeper purpose, how he camouflaged himself in the “cloud of merriment” like a magician slipping away in a puff of smoke.⁴⁸ At the end of the meal, the cabinet officers were startled when Lincoln, with an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, asked them to linger for a few minutes after the other guests had departed. He revealed the truth about General Scott’s absence and told them to return in the morning for an important meeting.

The president could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, his mind racing as it turned over, again and again, the problem of the forts.⁴⁹

But after months of vacillation and evasion, Lincoln had finally begun showing his mettle—an early sign of the decisiveness that would eventually come to characterize his leadership. Unlike most around him, he was thinking of Sumter in terms of its symbolism not just for the South (as the secessionists had defined it) but for the North. For almost six months, Union forces had been in retreat as the rebels pressed relentlessly forward. Beyond the corridors of power in Washington, in towns and cities throughout the loyal states, Americans were sinking into despair at their leaders’ apparent impotence.

“The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers,” wrote George Templeton Strong, who had voted for Lincoln. “We are a weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national existence.” Indeed, after all the failed attempts at compromise, it was becoming clear to millions of Americans that nothing less than this—America’s very existence as a nation—was now at stake. Acquiescence to secession would bring disgrace before the eyes of the world, proving that the republic had carried within itself, ever since its birth, the seeds of its own destruction. Submission to the South’s demands would be tantamount to the same thing, making a travesty of majority rule.

Newspapers of both parties savaged the new administration. It was beginning to seem, one Republican editor in Wisconsin wrote, that “the North must get down on its knees and ask Jeff Davis for the ‘privilege to breathe.’ ” A Pennsylvania paper quoted a Democratic congressman as calling Lincoln “vain, weak, puerile, hypocritical,” “the weakest man who has ever been elected,” and “a cross between a sandhill crane and Andalusian jackass.” The exact nature of that last hybrid may not have been altogether evident, but it was clearly not meant to be complimentary.⁵⁰

Since the very beginning of the secession crisis, the only glimmer of national pride had come with the surprise occupation of Fort Sumter back in December, the moment greeted with cheers and cannon salutes throughout the North. Whatever Major Anderson’s true feelings and motives, he and his small band of men were as yet the Union’s only heroes: the “Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” as P. T. Barnum had dubbed them. Could it be that Barnum had his finger on the North’s pulse, more than Secretary Seward and all the wise heads in Washington?

The move to Sumter had been a declaration that the nation would fight rather than surrender its integrity; the fort had become the Unionists’ sole emblem of defiance and steadfastness rather than compromise and withdrawal. Surrendering now would mean more than just giving up two acres of militarily worthless federal property, more than just throwing an easy sop to the South. To many people, it would mean nothing less than abrogating American history, abandoning the heroic struggle that—within living memory—had transformed thirteen small colonies into a vast and mighty empire. As one elderly citizen of Illinois, remembering his father’s service under General Washington in the Revolution, asked plaintively, “Shall all this be thrown away to please a few villains and Traitors[?]”⁵¹

Lincoln had in any case come to doubt that the South could be appeased. Moreover, as he suggested to Scott, he had come to doubt that the military situation in Charleston Harbor was as hopeless as Anderson claimed. Two weeks earlier, Lincoln had met with an obscure former navy captain named Gustavus V. Fox. Since January, Fox had been peddling a complicated scheme he had devised to get troops, food, and supplies to Sumter. Balding, diminutive, and pear-shaped, Captain Fox had never commanded a vessel larger than a mail steamer, and since his retirement five years earlier had occupied himself chiefly in the woolens industry. The main reason his plan even got a hearing is that he happened to be married to Postmaster General Blair’s sister-in-law. Instead of trying to get a heavily armed naval squadron into Charleston Harbor, Fox proposed keeping the warships out in deep water and sending in two shallow-draft tugboats that could slip over the sandbars and sunken hulks under cover of darkness. They would have to be civilian vessels, but their steam engines could be protected from incoming fire with bales of cotton or hay. Anyhow, Fox doubted that the rebels’ heavy cannons would be able to hit small, speedy craft half a mile away, and enemy boats could be kept at bay with barrages from Sumter’s own guns.

The president was intrigued by this improbable proposal—so much so that he ordered Fox to set out for Charleston and, taking advantage of the Confederates’ lax visitation policies, inspect Sumter for himself to ascertain whether the plan was practicable. Fox would spend barely an hour talking with Major Anderson, who found the scheme—or as much of it as Fox hazarded to reveal—utterly harebrained. By that point, however, the ex-captain was so besotted with his own idea that probably nothing could have dissuaded him. Returning directly to Washington, Fox assured the president that his tugboat-and-hay-bale strategy was foolproof. Anderson, meanwhile, dashed off a quick but pointed memo to the War Department, neatly demolishing the plan in three sentences—or so he thought.⁵²

On Friday, March 29, the day after Lincoln’s sleepless night, he convened his cabinet again at the White House. They met in his upstairs office, around a scuffed walnut table stacked high with papers.

For the past three weeks, the president had largely deferred to these men on matters of policy. Before his arrival in Washington, he had met almost none of them, and appointed them mostly according to the need to balance patronage among key states and political factions. “Neither, on the other hand, did they know him,” his secretaries Nicolay and Hay would later recall. “He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt due to themselves.… Perhaps the first real question of the Lincoln Cabinet was, ‘Who is the greatest man?’ It is pretty safe to assert that no one—not even he himself—believed it was Abraham Lincoln.”⁵³

But now Lincoln revealed the momentous decision he had just made without consulting any of these respected statesmen: he had ordered Captain Fox to be ready to depart for Charleston Harbor in little more than a week’s time if ordered to do so. It doubtless interested the president to note that his cabinet members’ opinions, too, had begun to shift. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, considered the group’s staunchest Republican partisan, had previously been wavering on the Sumter question. Now he came out firmly in favor of reinforcement. So did Gideon Welles, the sober-sided secretary of the navy. Still, the president did not commit himself. Perhaps Anderson was right after all. While Fox prepared his tugboats to launch, Lincoln could continue to ponder.⁵⁴

Whom was the president to trust: Anderson, whose loyalty might be doubted but whose military expertise was unquestioned; or Fox, whose loyalty was indubitable but whose grasp of naval strategy seemed tenuous at best?⁵⁵

The starkness of this decision, and the magnitude of the stakes, seemed too much for Lincoln to bear. The past few weeks had already taken a physical toll; those who knew him well had been astonished at how drawn and haggard he seemed. Not long after the cabinet meeting broke up, the president collapsed into bed again, incapacitated by a migraine “sick headache” such as he hadn’t had in years. For the next three days, he plunged into one of the spells of profound depression that had plagued him periodically his entire life.⁵⁶

But, as in previous such moments, Lincoln’s acute mental pain seems to have culminated in a flash of clarity.⁵⁷ Sometime during that awful weekend, the president had an epiphany: he needed to trust neither Fox nor Anderson—only himself. If the tugboat mission succeeded, it would be a blow to secession, a victory for the new administration, and a rallying point for Unionists (and Republicans) everywhere. Even if it failed—if the rebel guns succeeded in driving off his fleet—it would at least be proof of the administration’s resolve. Moreover, it would bring war. And this, Lincoln had come to believe, was no longer a result to be dreaded. At least not if the rebels fired the first shot.

Peaceful reunification with the wayward states now seemed clearly impossible. No offer, however generous, had been good enough for the Deep South. Crittenden had failed; Corwin had failed; the Peace Conference had failed; Douglas and Seward both appeared to be failing. The real issue now was whether the Upper South could be kept from casting its lot with the rebellion. The border states still wavered, with strong pro-Union factions active in all of them. A Northern show of strength—or a Southern display of intemperate aggression—might give those Unionists a rallying point. And a demonstration that secession would inevitably mean bloodshed might scare disunionists back into the fold. Marylanders, Virginians, Kentuckians, and Tennesseeans, especially, knew that their states would become battlegrounds in the event of full-scale war—and this consideration was not to be taken lightly.

Lincoln’s decision was probably also influenced by what he had heard at the cabinet meeting. Blair must have reiterated, as he had for months, that Southerners who doubted “the manhood of Northern men,” who mistakenly thought Yankees a pusillanimous race of “factory people and shop keepers” instead of warriors, needed to be taught a lesson.⁵⁸ Welles pointed out that armed resistance by the secessionists would “justify the government in using all the power at its command” to hold Sumter. But it was Salmon Chase, who just two weeks earlier had argued against provoking war, who now made the subtlest and most persuasive case for the other side. If war was now inevitable, the treasury secretary suggested, “I perceive no reason why it may not be best begun in consequence of military resistance to the efforts of the administration to sustain troops of the Union stationed, under the authority of the Government[,] in a Fort of the Union, in the ordinary course of service.”⁵⁹

The last phrase of Chase’s argument was key. The administration must contrive to make the Sumter expedition seem not some covert raid, but a routine, peaceable delivery of supplies as would be made to any federal garrison. Indeed, Captain Fox, with his background delivering mail rather than cannonballs, was the perfect man to lead it.

Now Secretary Seward, who had dominated the Republicans’ response to the crisis ever since the November election, suddenly found himself left in the intolerable, impossible position of advocating what had become a minority view. This threatened not only to unravel all the webs of statecraft he had woven over the past five months but also to discredit all the public and private assurances he had given. Even worse: to make a mockery of his assumption—shared by many others—that he would be president in all but name.

On Easter Sunday, March 31, as a last-ditch effort to resurrect his hopes, Seward sat down and composed an extraordinary memo to Lincoln. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” he lectured the commander-in-chief. Any aggressive act against the South by the federal government, he wrote, would confirm the public’s belief, in both the loyal and rebel states, that the current national conflict was one “upon Slavery, or about Slavery.” Keeping the garrison at Sumter would seem like the bellicose act of a hard-line abolitionist regime. Instead, the president must continue to buy time, until the slavery issue could be buried once and for all. The crisis must be framed as a question simply of “Union or Disunion.” The best way to reunite the nation, Seward advised, was to declare war not against the South but against Spain and France, forming a grand North American and Central American alliance that would drive European colonizers permanently out of the hemisphere. (Maybe while they were at it, he ruminated, they should attack the British and the Russians, too.) No doubt Seward’s sources in the White House had informed him of the president’s sudden and mysterious illness, raising hopes that an even more astonishing proposal would be accepted, perhaps even welcomed: Seward suggested that perhaps Lincoln was not feeling up to the job of orchestrating all this complicated policy, in which case he, as secretary of state, might be willing to step in—modestly and reluctantly, of course—and take the administration’s helm.⁶⁰

As Seward put the finishing touches on his memo, he was so pleased with its contents, and so confident of its success, that he sent an urgent message summoning his friend Henry J. Raymond, editor-in-chief of The New York Times, to Washington. Raymond arrived after midnight, ready to telegraph the scoop that Seward had been named premier of the new administration. First thing the next morning, Seward’s son Frederick hand delivered the memo to the White House, while Raymond stood by, with his editors in New York holding the front page open in expectation of the breaking news.⁶¹

Lincoln’s terse, stinging reply arrived within hours. In fact, he informed Seward, his administration did have a policy—it just happened not to be the one advocated by the secretary of state. Whatever needed to be done, he said, “I must do it,” though of course he would always be glad to seek his cabinet members’ advice. The president signed his letter—surely not without irony?—“Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln.”⁶²

The telegram Raymond sent to the Times was briefer than anticipated. “Nothing more,” it read.⁶³

Seward’s memo, insulting as it was, steeled Lincoln’s nerves, rousing him fully from the funk of the past several days. He, the upstart lawyer from Illinois, had now bid defiance to both the nation’s most powerful soldier and to its most powerful politician. The path ahead would be his alone. He also realized now that he could no longer rely solely on the wise old men of his cabinet for information and advice. Recalling the candid letters he had received the prior autumn from one of the artillery captains at Fort Sumter, the president contacted Mary Doubleday, asking if she would mind sharing any of her husband’s correspondence that might shed unbiased light on the circumstances in Charleston Harbor. Mrs. Doubleday, after busying herself with a pair of scissors to excise the purely personal passages of Abner’s recent letters, gave several excerpts to Lincoln. “If Government delays many days longer,” one read, “it will be difficult to relieve us in time, for the men’s provisions are going fast.”⁶⁴

Letting the garrison be starved out would be equivalent to surrender. War must not only come but come soon.

As Fox hurriedly readied his expedition to embark from New York, Lincoln took stock of the Union’s military preparedness. On the same day Seward received his presidential rebuke, a White House courier arrived at the War Department with one for the general-in-chief. “Would it impose too much labor on General Scott,” the president’s note asked tartly, “to make short, comprehensive, daily reports to me of what occurs in his department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence? If not, I will thank him to do so.”

What Lincoln learned was not encouraging. In the entire country east of the Mississippi, the United States Army numbered fewer than four thousand men—several thousand fewer than the rebel forces at Charleston alone. Only a few hundred men defended such places as New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and even Washington itself. Most of the national military was stationed in forts along the trails of the Far West and the Pacific coast. In all, the troops totaled just over seventeen thousand enlisted men and officers, many of whom could be expected to defect to the South once hostilities began. Even the military bureaucracy was almost laughably undermanned. The entire War Department had only ninety-three employees, from Secretary Simon Cameron down to the file clerks. No wonder Scott and Seward, poring over the columns of these statistics in the most recent departmental annual reports, were so anxious to avoid the clash of arms, or at least delay it.⁶⁵

Yet Lincoln, the Sangamon County militiaman, would step decisively into his role as commander-in-chief. This new assertiveness, too, would require him to look beyond War Department memos and official chains of command in Washington. Outside the purview of General Scott, Secretary Cameron, and their assorted file clerks, American citizens in the loyal states were arming themselves—in fact, had been doing so for months. Companies of Wide Awakes that had marched with lit torches to celebrate the Republican victory in November were now drilling with muskets. And amid the excitement that followed the occupation of Sumter, men throughout the North had formed new militia companies, “putting on their war paint to fight for the Union,” as one newspaper had reported back in January. By the end of that month, according to one estimate, nearly half a million had pledged to take up arms against secessionist treason.⁶⁶

The White House mail bags bulged with more and more letters like the one that arrived in mid-March from an old Springfield acquaintance, James L. Hill. Addressing his letter to “Dear Old Abe,” Hill wrote:

We hear with pain and regret that you are debating about evacuating Sumter lowring our Glorious old Flag that Washington through so many trials and Privations unfurled and sustained to be trampled on by traitors and to be made the hiss and scoff of the World. Do you know that Genl Washington or Jackson never said “I cant”[?] … Say the word By the Eternal Fort Sumter shall be reinforced and that glorious old Flag sustained and my word for it 100,000 good and true men with Jim Hill amongst them will at once respond to the call.… You are now the head of this nation and of course know more and better than we the reasons that are leading to this result but for Gods sake for Humanity and for your own honor dont let that word Cant form any part of the reasons.⁶⁷

Perhaps Lincoln was remembering Hill’s letter the following month when—just after the Sumter attack—leaders of the Young Men’s Christian Association visited the White House to make one last plea for compromise. “You gentlemen, come here to me and ask for peace on any terms,” Lincoln told them. “You would have me break my oath and surrender the government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—there is no honor or manhood in that.”⁶⁸

On April 6, Lincoln met at the White House with the governors of Indiana, Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, whom the ardently Republican editor Horace Greeley had marshaled to deliver a hard-line message to the president. All were ready to proffer troops. From Pennsylvania came news that the state legislature had appropriated half a million dollars to arm its militia, readying it to march southward at a moment’s notice in defense of the nation’s capital.⁶⁹

That same evening, Lincoln also made a decision that perhaps no career military officer would have made: he gave the enemy advance notice of Captain Fox’s arrival. In a message to Governor Pickens of South Carolina, Lincoln announced that vessels were on their way with provisions—but not arms or reinforcements—for Anderson’s men. Furthermore, barring an attack by the Confederates, Lincoln pledged no future military reinforcement of Sumter. He had, in fact, completely changed the purpose of the mission. It was now not merely destined to fail—as perhaps Lincoln had known all along it would be—but designed to do so. He would force the Confederates’ hands: either they would bow to federal authority, or they would unleash their artillery on tugboats that had come to relieve starving men, becoming aggressors in the eyes of the entire world.⁷⁰

Three days later, on the gray morning of April 9, the little flotilla under Fox’s command steamed past Sandy Hook and out into the open Atlantic amid heavy seas.⁷¹

ON THE LAST DAY OF PEACE, Abner Doubleday found a potato. It had been kicked into a corner and stepped on but was not too badly squashed, so he dusted it off as best he could and stowed it away for safekeeping. In a few days’ time, he knew, he might be glad he’d done so. The officers were down to half-rancid pork and a bit of the rice; the privates were issued one hardtack biscuit each as rations for the entire day.⁷²

The morning was clear and bright; full southern spring had come at long last. All around the fort, Charleston Harbor stirred with activity. Small steamers ferrying men and supplies among the various Confederate outposts passed insolently right beneath the guns of Sumter. Sometime before dawn, an odd boxlike structure, like a large floating coffin, had been towed out to the point of Sullivan’s Island and left inside the breakwater, its four square gun ports staring across the water like the eye sockets of a skull. This odd contraption clad in iron boilerplate—presaging later inventions that this war would inspire—the federal troops recognized as the Floating Battery, which the rebels had designed to be moved wherever they needed extra firepower. The now familiar Confederate flag flew from its gabled end. As Crawford noted, its new position, reinforcing the battery that the enemy had unmasked a few days earlier, made it utterly impossible for Fox’s tugboats to reach Sumter without being blown to splinters. (Across the harbor, on Cummings Point—just over half a mile from Sumter’s vulnerable gorge wall—the Carolinians had built a similar structure on land, the Iron Battery, with a metal roof angled to deflect cannonballs.) Perhaps most ominous of all, the rebels towed three wooden hulks out and moored them not far from the fort. At dusk they could be set afire and, lighting up Sumter’s brick walls with their reflected flames, let the enemy gunners take aim by night.⁷³

Late that afternoon, a small boat came creaking and splashing toward the fort’s wharf, a white flag of truce fluttering at its stern. There were nine men aboard: three white and six black. The three white men were Confederate officers. Two of them, trusted aides to General Beauregard, had come to offer terms of surrender. The third had joined them as a representative of Governor Pickens—and also because, as he later explained, he was fortunate enough to be “the owner of a large six-oared boat and six superior oarsmen,” property that he had brought to Charleston from his family plantation in case it might prove useful during the siege. Those “superior” slaves brought the Confederate envoys to Sumter.⁷⁴

Beauregard’s offer was a generous one. He would send vessels to carry Anderson and all of his men to safety. They would be allowed to take their personal possessions and any of their companies’ arms and property and be granted passage to any port in the United States that they wished. And before departing, they would be permitted to salute “the flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances”—before, of course, lowering it.

The rebels clearly wanted the battle to begin before Fox’s arrival. They had no idea what sort of naval force might be accompanying his tugboats, and it made little sense to hold fire until they found out. At this moment, they sought the fort, and nothing more; certainly not a major clash of arms. Anderson courteously asked Beauregard’s aides to wait while he conferred with his staff.⁷⁵

The eight officers gathered in the major’s quarters, standing around him in expectant silence. They had a decision before them, he said, that involved not only their military position but perhaps also their lives. He did not mention their honor. He did not mention their country. He read Beauregard’s missive to them aloud.

“Shall we accede?” Anderson asked his officers.⁷⁶

But before they could reply, their commander unfolded another piece of paper, this one dog-eared and creased. It was the letter he had received almost four months earlier and shared with no one until now: his final, secret orders from Secretary Floyd, addressed to him at Fort Moultrie, where they had reached him two days before Christmas:

It is neither expected nor desired that you should expose your own life or that of your men in a hopeless conflict in defense of these forts. If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms in your power. This will be the conduct of an honorable, brave, and humane officer.⁷⁷

The words rang strangely in the small room. They seemed to come from another eon of history. Floyd was long gone now, under congressional investigation in absentia on charges of treason and peculation in office. Buchanan was back on his farm in Pennsylvania, reviled and already half forgotten. Moultrie’s ramparts, manned now by Confederate gunners, seemed more distant and unreachable across the harbor than Sumter had ever been. How strange that Anderson should share those orders at this moment, after so many months—rather than, for that matter, reminding them about the dispatch that had come from Secretary Cameron just three days earlier, and which could be interpreted as giving him similar latitude to capitulate when necessary. And weren’t those orders from December the ones that he had already disobeyed, in spirit if not in letter?

But Floyd’s words burned as if they somehow formed the throbbing center of the anguish that Anderson had barely concealed almost since his arrival in Charleston Harbor. They were the ones he had gone over in his mind again and again, poking and probing them like a wound: What was the honorable thing to do, not just for his own sake but for his country’s? Could honor permit opening his guns upon his own countrymen, upon the fort his father had defended long ago? Was the honorable course the same as the brave one, or might it be braver to save the nation from civil war, even at the expense of his own reputation? And what would a truly humane man, a devout man, do? How best to avoid the senseless carnage that had so horrified him along the Indian trails of Illinois and among the villages of Mexico?

The thought of Fox’s expedition turned his stomach: that foolish little man and his pathetic tugboats pounded to pieces in the harbor, along with the soldiers and sailors unlucky enough to come under his command. Just a few days before, after receiving the news, Anderson had written to the War Department: “I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.” He had sent that letter via his friend in Cameron’s office, then asked him not to deliver it. Still, his officers all knew his heart, for they had all been there on the morning of the move to Sumter, when a rebel envoy came to demand an explanation and Anderson told the man ruefully, “In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South. These gentlemen”—here he turned to the group of blue-coated officers—“know it well.”⁷⁸

And yet those men knew other things about their commander, too. Most of them had been to West Point and had read—had suffered bravely through—Anderson’s manual of field artillery instruction, a book of such intricately crafted dullness that even a few paragraphs made the unfortunate cadet’s head spin and his eyeballs ache:

At the first command the cannoneers run to their respective places, and stand facing the boxes upon which they are to mount. The gunner and No. 5 in rear of the gun limber, No. 6 on the right of the gunner. Nos. 1 and 2 in rear of the caisson limber, No. 7 on the left of No. 1, Nos. 3 and 4 in front of the centre box of the caisson, No. 8 on the right of No. 3. The gunner and Nos. 2 and 3 seize the handles with the right hand, and step upon the stocks with the left foot, and Nos. 5, 1, and 4 seize the handles with the left hand, and step upon the stocks with the right foot.

At the second command, the gunner and Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 spring into their seats, the gunners and Nos. 5, 1, and 2 with their backs to the front.

No. 8 then springs into his seat in the same manner as No. 3, and Nos. 6 and 7 step in rear of their boxes, place their hands upon the knees of the men already mounted, step upon the stocks with their nearest feet, and springing up, step over the boxes and take their seats. The gunner and Nos. 5, 1, and 2 then face about to the front by throwing their legs outward over the handles.…

 … and so on, and on, and on, through 214 different maneuvers, each of them, and no others whatsoever, approved by the secretary of war, “with a view to insure uniformity throughout the army.” These maneuvers were illustrated by neat copperplate diagrams just as devoid of human volition, with every gun drawn as a little cross, each man as a squarish dot.⁷⁹

Could the author of such a treatise—whatever his personal feelings, whatever his inner pain—possibly strike his colors without returning fire? One might as well ask cannoneers Nos. 5, 1, and 4 to seize the handles of the gun carriage with their right hands instead of their left ones, or tell the squarish dots to abandon their little crosses and scamper off the margins of the page!

“The red tape of military duty,” John Hay would later sneer, “was all that bound his heart from its traitorous impulses.”⁸⁰ Though it may also have reflected Lincoln’s private views, this was unfair. For, as Anderson stood before his officers, the men who had lived with him at close quarters for the past six months, none doubted that in the end he would fight.

Reemerging from his quarters, Sumter’s commander addressed the Confederate officers. “I shall await the first shot,” he told them calmly—and then added: “If you do not batter us to pieces we shall be starved out in a few days.”

The envoys returned to their boat. Just before they departed, Anderson called after them with a final question: “Will General Beauregard open his batteries without further notice to me?”

One of the three men, Colonel James Chesnut of the provisional Confederate Army—until recently, the Hon. James Chesnut of the United States Senate—hesitated a moment before replying. “I think not,” he finally said. “No, I can say to you that he will not, without giving you further notice.”

Then Chesnut and the others stepped aboard and the slave oarsmen pushed off, carrying word to General Beauregard of his old professor’s intransigence.

NOTICE CAME IN THE SMALL HOURS of the night. It can be found today among Anderson’s papers in the Library of Congress: a single elegant sheet of lavender-blue notepaper, neatly creased where it was once folded between the gloved fingers of a Confederate adjutant. It reads:

April 12, 1861. 3:20 a.m.

Sir—By the authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard, commanding the provisional forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.

We have the honor to be, very respectfully,

your obedient servants,

James Chesnut, Jr., Aide de Camp

Stephen D. Lee, Captain, C.S. Army, Aide de Camp ⁸¹

After receiving this missive, Anderson went to tell his officers and men—who had been anxiously awaiting news—that all except the sentries should return to their beds and try to get some sleep. It was clear that Sumter’s defenders could accomplish little until sunrise, since the garrison had no lights; the fort’s lamp oil and candles had long since run out. After breakfast, such as it might be, they would begin to return fire. The only other order he gave was to raise the fort’s flag, which was duly run up its staff into the blackness above. But most of the officers and soldiers waited quietly on the ramparts to see the war begin.⁸²

Beauregard’s first shot, the signal shot, arrived ten minutes after its appointed time. Private John Thompson was one of the men who stayed on the parapet to watch it explode overhead like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. Later, his clearest memory of the moment was glimpsing his comrades’ faces in that quick flash of light: no one seemed afraid, Thompson wrote, but “something like an expression of awe crept over the features of everyone.”

In the minutes that followed, one battery after another opened up around the harbor, until nineteen of them were hammering away at the fort, sending solid rounds and mortar shells flying in from all sides. The Confederate artillerymen were mostly shooting high, as inexperienced gunners usually did: “Shot and shell went screaming over Sumter,” said Sergeant James Chester, “as if an army of devils were swooping around it.” But they would eventually find their range.⁸³

Abner Doubleday was among the few men to choose safety over scenery, no matter how awe-inspiring. He stayed in bed, in the makeshift but protected quarters he had improvised within one of the fort’s deep powder magazines.⁸⁴

The second shot of the Civil War crashed into the masonry at what seemed a foot away from Doubleday’s head—“in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear,” he recalled much later. Big patches of plaster cracked off the ceiling and fell in clouds of dust. The chamber shuddered again as another shell struck near the ventilation shaft, sending a burst of hot smoke roiling in, and Doubleday looked with some alarm at the crates of gunpowder stacked along one wall. He noticed, too, that some of the black powder had been carelessly spilled on the floor, where any stray spark might ignite it. The captain prudently dressed and went down early to breakfast, which consisted of tepid water and a little of the half-rancid pork.⁸⁵

Clouds hung low in the gray sky, and mist over the water, dimming the faint rays of dawn. At long last, enough light shone through for Sumter’s defenders to return fire. To Doubleday fell the honor, if honor it was, of firing the Union’s first shot. After breakfast, Anderson had divided the soldiers into three combat details, whereupon Doubleday marched his squad promptly to the cannons that pointed toward the Iron Battery at Cummings Point, whose heavy columbiad guns had been pelting Sumter steadily with solid shot for three hours. Now the captain would try to lob a thirty-two-pound ball inside one of its narrow embrasures. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he later recalled, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking. The United States was called upon not only to defend its sovereignty, but its right to exist as a nation. The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery. To me it was simply a contest, politically speaking, as to whether virtue or vice should rule.”⁸⁶

Perhaps the captain should have been less mindful of these political reflections, apropos as they were, and more attentive to his aim: his cannonball missed its mark by just a few yards, bounced harmlessly off the Iron Battery’s slanting roof, and landed with a splash in the nearby swamp. For the next two hours Doubleday’s men kept up a slow but steady fire, while from the other side of the fort—where the surgeon Crawford, having successfully pestered Anderson to let him join the fray, was commanding one of the gunnery details—they could hear round after round launched in the direction of rebel-held Fort Moultrie.⁸⁷

Sumter was now clenched within a ring of fire and smoke. From all sides, metal tore through the sky. Solid iron balls smashed against masonry; huge mortar shells buried themselves in the earthen parade ground and then exploded, the entire fort shuddering deep within itself like some wounded beast struggling to keep its footing. Men at their posts reeled as streams of dust and debris poured down onto their heads. Most terrifying of all were the wickedly pointed projectiles that occasionally came hurtling toward them, as straight and accurate as the shots of a dueling pistol, from the direction of Cummings Point, apparently discharged by some diabolical weapon none of the enlisted men had seen before. (This was a rifled cannon known as a Blakely gun, recently developed in England, that had arrived direct from London just three days earlier, a gift from some South Carolina expatriates there.) Its shots tore into the vulnerable gorge wall or sometimes, with ruthless accuracy, pierced the gun embrasures, the narrow openings through which the Union artillerymen fired.⁸⁸

PRIVATE THOMPSON WAS HELPING man one of Sumter’s cannons from behind one embrasure, inside a narrow brick box known as a casemate. Like almost all the enlisted men, he had never been on the receiving end of an artillery barrage. Thompson was an Irishman, and he would vividly describe the battle later in a letter to his father back in the old country. “The hissing shot came plowing along leaving wreck and ruin in their path,” he said. Soon the cannoneers were black with smoke and soot, and several men’s faces, cut by broken chunks of masonry knocked loose from the casemate walls, were covered with blood.

In contrast to the garrison’s officers, almost nothing is known of its ordinary soldiers. Only a few of their letters survive, and even those may well have been written on their behalf by more literate superiors.⁸⁹ A recent immigrant who listed his civilian occupation as “laborer,” John Thompson, was not atypical. As many as two-thirds of the men in the U.S. army in the 1850s were foreigners, mostly German and Irish. Officers often complained of soldiers who could not understand commands in English, and a significant share of recruits were unable to sign their own names to the enlistment form, let alone pen a letter. Sumter’s garrison was even more heavily foreign-born than average: of the seventy-three enlisted men whose birthplaces are known, only thirteen were born in the United States. The roster of privates reads like the roll call in an old World War II movie: Murphy, Schmidt, Onorato, Klein, Wishnowski.⁹⁰

At those rare moments when the entire nation went to war—1775, 1812, 1846—soldiering suddenly became a proud calling for patriotic Americans of every class and condition. The peacetime “regular army” was a different matter. Service in its ranks was considered a last resort for men who couldn’t get by otherwise in the merciless economy of nineteenth-century America—or the first resort of immigrants with no resources or connections. “Uncle Sam” (a figure known even to those newcomers) provided a roof over their heads (it was often one made of canvas), shoddy woolen uniforms, and food consisting mainly of bread and coffee, with occasional salt pork. Enlisted men existed in a different world than officers, even in such unusually close confines as Sumter’s: the officers’ letters and memoirs almost never mention soldiers as individuals, much less by name, and everyone took it for granted that officers would get the last of the rice and pork, while privates enjoyed their one daily biscuit apiece.⁹¹

It might seem inevitable that in the months of tension and uncertainty, crowded and makeshift quarters, and sparse rations, this heterogeneous cohort of enlisted men would have been driven to quarrels, brawls, or worse. Throughout the winter of 1861, newspapers in both North and South buzzed with rumors of soldiers at Sumter being shot for mutiny. Yet the reports from inside the fort show quite the opposite case: the longer the siege lasted, the more tightly the group knit itself together. Even the snobbish Crawford wrote often of the men’s high spirits, and said that when the final battle loomed, “it increased their enthusiasm to the highest pitch.” If anything, the common soldiers’ morale was higher than their officers’. Although it is often said today that half the U.S. Army resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy, this is untrue. Very few enlisted men in peacetime came from the South. Only twenty-six privates out of all sixteen thousand ended up defecting to the rebels—compared to more than three hundred out of the thousand or so men in the officer corps.⁹²

The Sumter privates’ sense that they were actors in an important moment of history seems to have intensified their sense of being Americans—even among those who, technically speaking, weren’t. Thompson, though looking forward to the end of his enlistment in a few months so he could go back home to his family in County Derry, spoke of the pride and defiance he shared with his comrades when they “hoisted our colors the glorious ‘Stars and Stripes,’ ” and of their scorn for the “rash folly” of the rebels: “They no doubt expected that we would surrender without a blow, but they were never more mistaken in their lives.”⁹³

Nineteenth-century cannon warfare required not just a brave heart but also a strong back. Artillery was thought the least glamorous branch of the service, with none of the élan of the cavalry or even the occasional chance at heroism offered by the infantry. Its men were considered mules; its officers technicians. In fact, artillery combat took considerable skill and coordination. Four cannoneers plus a crew chief, or gunner—usually a noncommissioned officer—fired each of Sumter’s big casemate guns. After each shot, the men used iron handspikes and a roller to heave the gun back onto its wheeled carriage, no small feat considering that the barrel of one cannon might be more than ten feet long and weigh over four tons. Two men sponged out its still-hot chamber with a wet swab, lest the next charge ignite prematurely. To load the gun, they rammed in the cartridge (a woolen bag of gunpowder) and a cannonball weighing anywhere from twenty-four to forty-two pounds. Then they heaved the cannon forward again, and the gunner, with help from one of the cannoneers, used a handspike to aim the barrel left or right and an elevating screw to move it up or down. A cannoneer pushed a friction primer down into the vent hole at the back of the barrel, with a long lanyard attached that would set the primer aflame as it was pulled out. When the gunner gave the order to fire, the cannoneer yanked the lanyard, the charge exploded in the barrel, and the cannonball hurtled toward its target.⁹⁴

The crash of an enormous cannon firing within a confined casemate could be literally deafening; the concussion that shook the massive brick walls forced the breath out of men’s lungs, and left them gulping black smoke. Sumter’s soldiers were, moreover, already dizzy from lack of food and sleep. It was only the adrenaline of combat that kept them, though barely, on their feet. They worked the guns in three shifts, and when a crew’s turn ended, they collapsed into whatever seemed a protected spot, their heads spinning and stomachs tight with hunger.

As for the officers, they kept up their esprit de corps as best they could, even to the point of trading wisecracks. When Seymour came to relieve Doubleday at the end of a three-hour shift, he facetiously asked his friend, “Doubleday, what in the world is the matter here, and what is all this uproar about?”

“There is a trifling difference of opinion between us and our neighbors opposite,” Doubleday replied, “and we are trying to settle it.”

“Very well,” said Seymour, “do you wish me to take a hand?”

“Yes, I would like to have you go in.”

“All right, what is your elevation and range?”

“Five degrees, and twelve hundred yards.”

“Well,” said Seymour, “here goes!” And his gun crews stepped to their places.⁹⁵

DISPIRITINGLY, THOUGH, all this labor was having almost no effect on the enemy. Sumter’s casemate guns were designed to smash the hulls of wooden warships entering the nearby channel, not shore fortifications that lay at the very limit of their range. The fort’s cannonballs glanced off the Iron Battery, one Confederate observer said, like marbles tossed at a turtle’s back; Doubleday himself compared them to peas thrown on a plate. (One lucky hit did bring down its rebel flag, though, to cheers from Sumter’s gun crews.) Shots aimed at Moultrie and the other rebel batteries had, if anything, even less effect, burrowing harmlessly into the sandbags and cotton bales that the Confederates had piled against the ramparts. This is to say nothing of the limits of manpower: Sumter’s gun crews were so severely shorthanded that only a few cannons could be fired at a time. And Major Anderson refused even to let his gunners near the fort’s heaviest artillery, its mortars and columbiads on the upper tier of the fort, for fear of exposing the men to undue harm.⁹⁶

For their part, the Confederate cannons had as yet inflicted no more than minor injuries on any of Sumter’s defenders. A muzzle-loading artillery piece could fire twelve times an hour at most without risk of exploding, so even at the height of the attack, the rebel shots were coming in at an average of just a few per minute, and could be spotted well before impact. Ex-sergeant Peter Hart, Anderson’s old Mexican War aide, took the hazardous duty of stationing himself on the fort’s parapet. “Now fire away, boys,” he told his comrades, “I can’t fight without breaking a soldier’s word, but I’ll tell you where your shots strike, and where to look for danger.” Every time Hart spied an incoming round, he called out “Shot!” or “Shell!” and the men ducked into a protected corner of the casemates, as if playing some deadly version of dodgeball.⁹⁷

Union and Confederate gunsmoke drifted, commingling, across the harbor. At midday, the clouds and mist gave way to sheets of rain. At last, through the downpour, Anderson and his officers spotted three vessels steaming toward the mouth of the harbor: the first detachment of Captain Fox’s relief expedition. Briefly, the men’s morale lifted. But then the friendly ships stopped and anchored outside the bar, to remain there, stolidly immobile, for the rest of the battle. (Fox would later blame his inaction on a combination of the weather and lack of firepower.)⁹⁸

Gradually, the ceaseless Confederate volleys were taking their toll on the fort. The place that had been the men’s little world for more than three months—whose every stone, Crawford had written, had impressed itself on his heart—was being obliterated. Cannonballs smashed through the brick walls of the officers’ quarters and knocked down its chimney; exploding shells blew off large chunks of the parapet. And the constant battering was gnawing away, bit by bit, at Sumter’s massive outer defenses. By the end of the afternoon, a gaping hole had opened in one corner of the gorge wall.⁹⁹

Even more surreal, though, was the sight of Charleston—an American city, where a few months earlier, the men had strolled with their wives and sweethearts along the Battery or picnicked on the beach at Sullivan’s Island—become enemy territory. Fort Moultrie, where some of the men had lived for years, was now a target of their guns.

As evening fell and the rebel gunfire gradually slackened, Sumter’s defenders faced new worries. Chester later wrote: “The fleet might send reinforcements; the enemy might attempt an assault. Both would come in boats; both would answer in English. It would be horrible to fire upon friends; it would be fatal not to fire upon enemies.” Meanwhile, Sumter’s supply of cartridges was running low. The men cut up extra clothing and bedsheets to sew into bags for the gunpowder, and Major Anderson contributed several dozen pairs of his socks.¹⁰⁰

The rain, meanwhile, had become a full-blown storm. Amid the rumble of thunder and the occasional crash of enemy fire, the crews loaded their guns with grapeshot and canister, aimed them toward the most vulnerable points in the outer wall, and at last, after midnight, bedded down next to them as comfortably as they could. “The enemy kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent us from getting any rest,” Thompson recalled, “but they failed in their object for I for one slept all night as sound as I ever did in my life.”¹⁰¹

By daybreak the storm lifted, and the morning of April 13 shone bright and clear. No rebels had stormed the fort by night—but no help had come, either. Fox’s three ships lay outside the harbor, exactly where the men had last seen them.

Enemy fire rained down on Sumter more briskly than ever—and, thanks to the better weather, more accurately. As the soldiers struggled to work their guns, several were badly cut up by flying pieces of masonry; a shell bursting just outside one of the casemates sent metal fragments tearing into a man’s legs. Soon the defenders could see the enemy firing red-hot cannonballs, heated in furnaces ashore. The rebel gunners were now truly shooting to kill. A mortar round plowed through the roof of the half-ruined officers’ quarters, and the large building soon became a roaring tower of flame. The iron water tanks inside burst, and a scalding cloud of steam and smoke, acrid from the slow burning of damp pine floorboards and rafters, poured into the casemates as the artillerymen fell, blinded and choking, to the ground, masking their faces with wet handkerchiefs. Most of the garrison would have suffocated to death, Doubleday said later, had not the wind mercifully shifted and begun blowing the smoke in the opposite direction. But the men soon confronted an even more terrifying threat as the blaze that had begun in the officers’ quarters began closing in on the cannoneers’ gunpowder stores. The men heaved barrel after barrel out of the embrasures.¹⁰²

Doubleday ordered his cannoneers to shoot off a few rounds, just to show the enemy “that we were not all dead yet.” But everyone knew that they could not keep even this going for much longer. Only the casemates’ fifteen-foot-thick walls sheltered the spent fighters from the inferno around them, and it was unclear how long even these could withstand the attack. “The roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells, and our own which were exploding in the burning rooms, the crashing of the shot, and the sound of masonry falling in every direction, made the fort a pandemonium,” Doubleday later remembered.¹⁰³

Across the harbor, meanwhile, the sun still shone. Thousands of Charlestonians—“male and female, white and black, young and old,” one observer wrote—were watching the battle from wharves, rooftops, and church steeples. By midday, disappointingly little of the fort was visible: it was as if a volcano had risen from the sea at the center of the harbor, vomiting smoke. All that the spectators could make out through the thick clouds was Sumter’s flag on its tall staff.¹⁰⁴

The smoke hid even that flag for a while. When it drifted away once more, the enemy banner—the familiar Stars and Stripes—had disappeared. Cheers rang from the rooftops. All around the harbor, the rebel gunners held their fire. Fort Sumter, they congratulated themselves, had finally struck its colors.

ON THE ISLAND, the air began clearing enough for the battered garrison to continue its fight. Several guns boomed forth defiant once more. But just as Private Thompson and the rest of his gun crew were loading their cannon, they heard a commotion from the adjacent casemate. Cannoneers were seizing muskets and pointing at something, or someone, on the beach just outside the fort. And then—astonishing and absurd—a man’s face appeared, right in the embrasure through which Thompson was about to fire his cannon.

It was the face of a middle-aged gentleman, a bit thick in the jowls, with a black beard that seemed to bristle angrily in all directions and black eyes that flashed with righteous indignation. He was dressed not in a military uniform but in a frock coat and top hat. Gasping with exertion, cursing and swearing, he was now struggling unsuccessfully to pull himself over the sill with one arm, while his other hand awkwardly grasped a sword, a white handkerchief tied to its point. The soldiers, crowding around, held the stranger at bay with their muskets. Was this some sort of rebel trick? The advance guard of an amphibious attack on the fort? No. The bizarre apparition was—though none of the men recognized him—the Honorable Mr. Louis T. Wigfall, lately United States senator from the now seceded state of Texas.¹⁰⁵

Fort Sumter had not, in fact, surrendered: a stray shot from the rebels had toppled the flagstaff. Ex-Sergeant Hart and two comrades, at great risk to life and limb, had ventured forth to raise the banner again on a makeshift pole—for which valiant feat they would soon be celebrated by journalists, lithographers, and political orators throughout the Union. But during the brief silencing of the Confederate batteries, Senator Wigfall, smelling glory in the air, had taken it upon himself to set forth from Moultrie in a small rowboat with the goal of personally securing Anderson’s formal capitulation. An unlucky Confederate private and three slaves, whom he had dragooned into service at the oars, accompanied him. By the time Moultrie’s commanding officers noticed what Wigfall was up to and began yelling for him to stop, the boat was already out of earshot. They fired a warning shot across his bow, but still the senator—much to the consternation of his oarsmen—would not turn back. By the time they reached the middle of the channel, the Confederate batteries around the harbor had begun opening fire once more, as had Anderson’s cannons, and the colonel in charge at Moultrie ordered his gunners to sink that “damned politician.”

The politician in question, despite his extensive youthful experience with dueling pistols, found incoming artillery rounds a bit harder to face. Wigfall tied his handkerchief to his sword and stood up in the bow, hoping the gunners would honor his makeshift flag of truce, but managing only to nearly swamp the boat. With shots splashing around them, he and his crew somehow made it safely to the shore, with Sumter under a full-on Confederate barrage. Showers of bricks fell from above as the portly senator clambered over rocks and debris toward the embrasures, sword and handkerchief in hand. No one in the fort had noticed his boat coming.¹⁰⁶

“We stubbornly refused him admittance for a while,” wrote Thompson, “but he begged so hard, exhibited the flag he carried and even surrendered his sword”—handing it to Thompson—“that at last we helped him in.” Now, to the artillerymen’s astonishment, the bearded gentleman ordered them to stop firing, a command that they naturally ignored.¹⁰⁷

At last someone called for Major Anderson, who tried to mask his own surprise as he stepped into the casemate and saw the stranger. “To what am I indebted for this visit?” he asked dryly.

“I am Colonel Wigfall, of General Beauregard’s staff,” the ex-senator rasped in as official a voice as he could muster. “For God’s sake, Major, let this thing stop. There has been enough bloodshed already.” He had come, he said, to offer terms of surrender. Under the present circumstances, in fact, the shell-shocked envoy appeared ready to accept any terms whatsoever that would make the shooting go away.

But Wigfall’s little speech, plain enough on its face, was a bit specious at best. For one thing, the “bloodshed” so far consisted of a single Confederate horse. More important, although implying that he came on Beauregard’s authority, Wigfall had not even seen the Confederate commander in several days, much less received any instructions from him. The men at Sumter could not have known this, of course.

Anderson pointed out that there had been no bloodshed, at least on his own side—“and besides, your batteries are still firing at me.”

“I’ll soon stop that,” Wigfall replied briskly. He turned to Thompson, who held the sword and handkerchief under one arm, pointed to the embrasure, and told the astonished private, “Wave that out there.”

“Wave it yourself,” Thompson retorted in his thick brogue, handing the Confederate his sword back.

Wigfall leapt boldly into the opening, somehow believing that the gunners half a mile away would glimpse his handkerchief through the smoke and recognize it as a flag of truce. Presently a shot from Moultrie slammed into the nearby wall, disabusing him swiftly of this notion.

“If you desire that to be seen,” Anderson said gently, “you had better send it to the parapet.”

Several minutes later, Charlestonians on their distant rooftops spotted something waving on a pole above Sumter’s bomb-scarred ramparts, alongside the Stars and Stripes. This was not Senator Wigfall’s handkerchief but a full-size white flag. It signaled a cease-fire while Major Anderson negotiated—“or rather dictated,” as Thompson later said—his terms of surrender.¹⁰⁸

“NOTHING OF MILITARY IMPORTANCE has reached me today,” scribbled Winfield Scott in a note to the president that evening, more or less precisely as Fort Sumter was falling into Confederate hands. “Except,” the general added, “thro’ the newspaper.”¹⁰⁹

If General Scott had been known for his drolleries, this might have come off as a rather clever one. (He was not, so it didn’t.) For in fact, the headlines of every single paper throughout the Union blazed with the most astonishing military news since Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Editors dug deep in their bins of lead type for the largest fonts available, nor did they stint on exclamation points. The Milwaukee Sentinel’s front page was typical: “Hostilities Commenced! FORT SUMTER BOMBARDED! The Rebels Strike the First Blow! MOULTRIE OPENS ON MAJ. ANDERSON! SEVEN OF THEIR BATTERIES FOLLOW! Prompt Response from Sumter!” (And so on, through nine more lines of boldface and italic type and another five exclamation points.)¹¹⁰

It had taken almost an entire day for most Americans to learn about the first shots at Sumter, since telegraphic communication between North and South had been erratic since secession. On the night of Friday the 12th, Walt Whitman went to the opera in New York. The Fourteenth Street Academy of Music was presenting Verdi’s latest, Un ballo in maschera, which had been censored in Europe for its undertones of liberal nationalism but was now touring the United States to great acclaim. After the show, the poet was strolling back toward Brooklyn when he heard the shrill cries of newsboys ahead—a rare sound indeed at midnight. The lads came tearing down Broadway, “rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual,” singing out “Extry! Got the bombardment of Fort Sumter!!!” Soon every gaslight on the street had its own little huddle of New Yorkers poring over dispatches from Charleston.¹¹¹

The news, Whitman would later remember, “ran through the Land, as if by electric nerves.” Many people didn’t believe it at first: surely, they said, this was rebel propaganda. Perhaps someone had tampered with the telegraph lines. Contradictory reports began coming in: Major Anderson had shelled downtown Charleston, incinerating the city and sending thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives. No, he had gone over to the Confederate side, was blowing up his fort piece by piece, and planned to escape by sea in a small boat. Captain Doubleday, resisting surrender, had been clapped in irons by Anderson and then promptly went insane. And perhaps most prevalent: Sumter had been reinforced by Fox’s fleet. (Saturday night’s performance at the Academy of Music was interrupted during Act 4, when the house manager stepped onstage to announce this last piece of splendid news, inspiring the soprano to launch immediately into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”)

In any event, wrote the skeptical George Templeton Strong, no man of sense could believe that the rebels “have been so foolish and thoughtless as to take the initiative in civil war.”¹¹²

But when later reports confirmed the initial headlines, disbelief gave way to shock. Throughout the country—even in the heart of busy Manhattan, even on Wall Street—business came to a halt as men and women left their shops and offices to crowd into barrooms, hotel lobbies, and public squares, anywhere that they might hear the very latest facts and rumors. Crowds formed around newsstands, too, pushing and shoving to press pennies upon the beleaguered vendors. From Fort Kearny in the Nebraska Territory—the westernmost point of the telegraph lines—a Pony Express rider galloped off toward California with the news. In Washington, when a man in the lobby of the Willard ventured to express his sympathy with the rebels, police had to come break up the ensuing fracas.¹¹³

Perhaps the calmest place in the country was, oddly enough, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Willard.

“There was little variation in the business of the Executive Mansion on that eventful Saturday,” Hay and Nicolay would remember. The president signed official papers, read his mail, and met patiently with the usual parade of dubiously qualified patronage seekers, who insisted on a hearing even at this moment of historic crisis. When a delegation of congressmen came bustling into Lincoln’s office, pressing him for his reaction to the momentous news, he replied dryly, “I do not like it,” and changed the subject. The only visitors who left the White House with something more substantial were three Virginians, members of the statewide convention considering secession. He reassured them that he would hold fast to the policy of nonaggression promised in his inaugural address. But, he now added almost matter-of-factly, “in every event, I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” This was, as the Virginians would soon learn, an all-important clarification.¹¹⁴

Although there is no record of exactly when or how Lincoln got the news of Sumter’s surrender, initial reports probably reached him Saturday evening, not many hours after the event itself. Incredibly, the White House and War Department had no official intelligence or communications system of any kind, but at least two citizens in the South—one of them a prominent Charleston secessionist, the other an obscure Savannah accountant—were considerate enough to send Lincoln telegrams that night.¹¹⁵

Just six months earlier, very few Americans had ever even heard of Fort Sumter. But now the loss of this two-acre island—the lowering of one flag and the raising of another over a useless piece of federal real estate—was suddenly a national calamity. For many, it was also a summons to vengeance. In Philadelphia, one block from Independence Hall, a mob of young men wrecked the offices of a small pro-Southern newspaper imprudently named The Palmetto Flag, then marched up Market Street waving American flags and brandishing nooses, on the hunt for other secessionists. In a bucolic little Indiana village, schoolchildren hanged Jeff Davis in effigy.¹¹⁶

For others, though, that eventful weekend inspired more complicated thoughts and feelings.

Saturday afternoon found James Garfield sitting alone in the nearly deserted chamber of the Ohio senate. The legislators had adjourned early; rain beat monotonously against the windows; and only a small knot of men remained on the other side of the room, discussing the news and poring over a large map of Charleston Harbor. The militia bill that Garfield had championed vainly all winter had swept to passage immediately at the first word of the attack. But he took no pleasure in this belated victory. Struggling privately with a tangle of emotions—anxiety, excitement, melancholy, anger, mental exhaustion—Garfield began a letter to his old friend Harry Rhodes. He felt almost as if he could see the battle at Sumter happening before his own eyes, he said. It enraged him to think of how his government had left Major Anderson on the island “with his hands tied” for three months while the rebels armed for the attack—so that now “he will almost certainly surrender to the traitors or perish.” Here he set the letter down, unable to continue. By the time he picked it up again the next morning, word had come that Anderson had, indeed, struck his colors. Yet Garfield’s spirits had lifted. He and Jacob Cox, his roommate and fellow senator, had just been to see the governor—who, flatteringly, had wished to confer with the two young men about Ohio’s response to the crisis. With Sumter still burning, ruined, on its far-off island, Garfield felt a sudden rush of clarity about the future, which Rhodes doubtless recognized:

The war has now fully begun. I am glad we are defeated at Sumpter. It will rouse the people. I can see no possible end to the war, till the South is subjugated. I hope we will never stop short of complete subjugation. Better to lose a million men in battle than allow the government to be overthrown. The war will soon assume the shape of Slavery & Freedom—the world will so understand it—& I believe the final outcome will redound to the good of humanity.

He and Cox, he added, had been talking not just about “the prospects of the country [but] the future of our own lives.” They had decided, Garfield reported, to leave politics behind. They would go into the army.¹¹⁷

In Boston, too, many were thinking about Slavery & Freedom. On Sunday afternoon, twelve-year-old Franky Garrison sprinted home from the Common, where he had just heard about Anderson’s surrender, to tell his father the news. A few days later, when he helped proofread the galleys of that week’s Liberator, the boy must have realized what a sea change was occurring. “The North United at Last,” one headline ran. For thirty years, the elder Garrison had fought not just to defeat Southern slaveholders but also to win over the divided heart of his own region. He had hung the star-spangled banner upside down, as an emblem of the despicable Constitution. But now Franky and his father watched with pride as a huge American flag was raised right in front of the Liberatoroffice, on a staff 140 feet tall. The more that slave drivers trampled on that banner, Garrison confessed, the handsomer it seemed. His comrade Wendell Phillips went even further. A week after Anderson’s surrender, he stood amid red, white, and blue bunting before a cheering crowd of Boston abolitionists. “For the first time in my anti-slavery life,” he told them, “I speak beneath the stars and stripes.… To-day the slave asks God for a sight of this banner, and counts it the pledge of his redemption.”¹¹⁸

Indeed, the response to Sumter seemed to manifest itself, among Northerners of every political and cultural hue, as a kind of flag mania. Along the thoroughfares of major cities, each shop and office “successively ran up its colors like a fleet of ships on the eve of the action.” On village greens and town squares—places where it had never previously occurred to anyone that the national emblem belonged—citizens gathered for solemn ceremonies around hastily erected poles. (And from that day to this, there would scarcely be a single American hamlet, no matter how tiny, that did not display the Stars and Stripes in its most conspicuous available spot.) Artists and intellectuals were swept up in the moment as well. The painter Frederic Church, previously known for producing landscapes of exquisite delicacy, now daubed a canvas with a garish piece of patriotic kitsch: a sunrise scene in which the clouds formed red and white stripes, with a square patch of stars twinkling against blue sky in the upper left. (This was quickly transformed into a best-selling lithograph.)¹¹⁹

For a century and a half, historians have struggled to explain exactly why the attack at Charleston struck such a transformative chord. Even Bruce Catton, one of the Civil War’s greatest twentieth-century chroniclers, was left scratching his head: “In the strangely revealing light of the exploding shell,” he wrote, Americans “saw something that was to carry them through four years of war. It is hard to say just what it was, for no one bothered to be explicit about it and time has dimmed it anyway.” George Bancroft, America’s most revered historian in the 1860s, did try to be explicit, and came up with a tortured explanation involving navigation rights on the Chesapeake and Mississippi. But in any case, he remembered of that April, “I witnessed the sublimest spectacle I ever saw.”¹²⁰

Perhaps there was an explanatory power in the flags themselves. Two weeks after Sumter’s surrender, Henry Ward Beecher gave a sermon at his Brooklyn church to bless the colors that two local volunteer companies were carrying with them to war. With characteristic theatricality, the great preacher eulogized the flag in Christlike terms:

It was upon these streaming bars and upon these bright stars that every one of that immense concentric range of guns was aimed, when Sumter was lifted up in the midst, almost like another witnessing Calvary.… And do you know that when it was fallen, in the streets of a Southern city, it was trailed, hooted at, pierced with swords? Men that have sat in the Senate of the United States ran out to trample upon it; it was fired on and slashed by the mob; it was dragged through the mud; it was hissed at and spit upon; and so it was carried through Southern cities! That our flag … should, in our own nation, and by our own people, be spit upon, and trampled under foot, is more than the heart of man can bear! … It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution.¹²¹

Whitman expressed the same idea in plainer language—although the simple words masked deeper complexities—when he wrote: “The negro was not the chief thing: the chief thing was to stick together.”

The attack on Sumter forced Americans everywhere to pick sides: to stand either with the flag or against it—and overwhelmingly, perhaps for a multitude of individual reasons, Northerners chose to stand with it. And that expression of national unity, in turn, became the strongest possible argument for the Union itself: for the idea that the flag could shelter beneath its folds Americans of many opinions and temperaments, and that disagreement need not mean disunion. The pure wordless symbolism of a piece of cloth could represent both the deepest traditions of American radicalism and those of American conservatism. For people like Garrison and Phillips, it had become a pledge to stand firm against the slave power and uphold what they saw as the purest distillation of America’s commitment to liberty, as embodied in the Declaration. To more orthodox minds, it was a summons to defend the nation and the Constitution.

Even Emerson, the great apostle of individualism, found himself beholding with astonished admiration the “whirlwind of patriotism, not believed to exist, but now magnetizing all discordant masses under its terrific unity.” He was then in the midst of a lecture series in Boston on the relationship between “Life” and “Literature.” Amid his abstract ruminations, he had taken note of the national crisis; a few days before Sumter he had spoken of “the facility with which a great political fabric can be broken.” But the following week, he threw aside his prepared text and spoke instead from a sheaf of hastily scribbled notes. The sage went so far as to admit he had been wrong:

It is an affair of instincts; we did not know we had them; we valued ourselves as cool calculators; we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace;—and now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace; they are wiser than their teachers.… The interlocutions from quiet-looking citizens are of an energy of which I had no knowledge. How long men can keep a secret! I will never again speak lightly of a crowd. We are wafted into a revolution which, though at first sight a calamity of the human race, finds all men in good heart, in courage, in a generosity of mutual and patriotic support. We have been very homeless, some of us, for some years past,—say since 1850; but now we have a country again.… This affronting of the common sense of mankind, this defiance and cursing of friends as well as foes, has hurled us, willing or unwilling, into opposition; and the nation which the Secessionists hoped to shatter has to thank them for a more sudden and hearty union than the history of parties ever showed.¹²²

Ironically, the Confederates’ attack on, and swift victory at, Fort Sumter turned out to be their worst strategic blunder of the war, a blunder, indeed, that may have cost the South its independence. It is difficult to see what the rebels would have lost if they had allowed Major Anderson and his tiny force to be provisioned and remain indefinitely. Indeed, they could have couched their forbearance as a humanitarian gesture, a token of their peaceful intentions, that might have won them allies not just in the North but also—all-importantly—among the nations of Europe. Certainly leaving Sumter alone would have bought them more time: time to more fully organize and equip the South’s armies; time to establish all the ordinary apparatus—a postal service, a stable national currency, a judicial system—that serve to make government a stable fact rather than a speculative figment. Both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world, the Confederate States of America might have come to seem like a fait accompli.¹²³ Instead, Davis, his cabinet, and his generals had only a perfunctory discussion before deciding to shell the fort.

As Lincoln told a confidant: “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”

To be sure, some Americans in the North continued decrying what they saw as a misbegotten war against slavery. “A servile insurrection and the wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists,” wrote the editor of one New York paper in mid-April. “The Administration, egged on by the halloo of the Black Republican journals of this city, has sent on its mercenary forces to pick a quarrel and initiate the work of devastation and ruin.”¹²⁴

A few still held out hope for a bloodless reunion. One pro-Union meeting in New York began with extravagant toasts, not to Anderson or Lincoln but to John J. Crittenden. When the venerable senator had announced his retirement when Congress adjourned in March, he made clear to his friends that he wished never to see Washington again. He then hurried home, exhausted and demoralized, to his Kentucky farm. Just after the fall of Sumter, however, with his state teetering on the brink of secession, the old politician took to the stump once more, begging his fellow Kentuckians to steer a neutral course: remain loyal to their country but take up arms against neither North nor South. The state did not secede. In the coming months, however, Crittenden would see three of his own sons march off to war: two to fight for the Union, one for the Confederacy.¹²⁵

A few abolitionists, too, could not bring themselves to join in the war fever. The farthest that Lydia Maria Child could go was to hope that someday the Stars and Stripes might be worthy of the adoration it was receiving. “Meanwhile,” she wrote to a friend, “I wait to see how the United States will deport itself. When it treats the colored people with justice and humanity, I will mount its flag in my great elm-tree, and I will thank you to present me with a flag for a breast-pin; but until then, I would as soon wear the rattlesnake upon my bosom as the eagle.”¹²⁶

Child was not the only one to speculate on what war might mean for the slaves. On the morning he heard about Sumter’s fall, William Russell, the London Times’ urbane correspondent, was already in Baltimore on his way to catch a steamer bound for Charleston. Stopping for a quick shave, he asked the black barber what he made of the news. “Well, sare,” the man replied, “ ’spose colored men will be as good as white men.”¹²⁷

Russell later offered this tidbit to his readers in a tone of mildly sympathetic amusement. The poor deluded Negro!

SHORTLY AFTER ANDERSON’S SURRENDER to the intrepid Wigfall, General Beauregard’s authorized aides arrived at the fort. In the end, they decided to honor the agreement that the major and the ex-senator had reached. Only Doubleday seemed irked that the battle was over: he continued to believe that it might have ended differently if his commander had worried less about avoiding bloodshed and more about defeating the enemy, maybe by trying to shell Charleston itself. Anderson, for his part, was quick to assure the Confederate envoys that he had always aimed his cannons at fortifications rather than at men, and when told that none of the secessionists had been wounded by Sumter’s fire, he lifted up his hands and exclaimed, “Thank God for that!” (Doubleday listened, fuming: “As the object of our fighting was to do as much damage as possible, I could see no propriety in thanking Heaven for the small amount of injury we had inflicted.”)¹²⁸

The only term of surrender at which the Confederates initially balked was Anderson’s request to salute his flag a final time before lowering it. But in the end they allowed him to do so.

On Sunday afternoon—a day of splendid sunshine—the tattered national ensign rose again on its repaired flagpole and unfurled into a strong breeze. Anderson was determined to honor it with no fewer than a hundred cannon blasts. This was not to be. His salute, like the Union, was cloven in half. With the fiftieth shot came disaster and a terrible omen: a gun crew, exhausted by the recent ordeal, reloaded its weapon too hastily, neglecting to cool the muzzle with a thorough sponging before ramming in the powder. In the ensuing explosion, one soldier—a young Irish immigrant named Daniel Hough, well liked among the men of the garrison—was killed almost instantly, his body torn apart. Several others were badly wounded.

But there was no time to mourn the dead or care for the injured. Daniel Hough’s remains were left behind to be buried by the enemy, as so many other men’s would be in the years ahead. Still in shock, his comrades formed ranks behind Captain Doubleday and marched through Sumter’s main gate toward a waiting transport. Behind them they could hear wild cheering as the Stars and Stripes came down and a Confederate banner went up.

Early the next day—Monday, April 15—the U.S. steamer Baltic, with Major Anderson and all his men aboard, cleared the bar of Charleston Harbor and set out into open water.¹²⁹