ON MARCH 4, ABRAHAM LINCOLN was to be inaugurated on a stage erected on the steps of the Capitol building, its dome still an ugly construction site that looked like the exposed skeleton of the Republic. Charles P. Stone, the just-promoted colonel charged with Lincoln’s protection, had stationed sharpshooters the length of Pennsylvania Avenue with orders to kill anyone they suspected of trying to fire on the president, and he positioned more snipers in the wings of the Capitol, looking down on the stage where Lincoln would speak. The night before, the colonel learned of plans to put a bomb beneath the podium, so he stationed troops around the base, and he scattered plainclothes detectives throughout the crowd.
Lincoln and Buchanan rode in an open carriage from the Willard Hotel to the Capitol, with the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue so thick in places that it forced the carriage to stop again and again. Before them went a float that was supposed to be the U.S. Constitution; on it sat thirty-four young girls, for the thirty-four states, dressed in virginal white. When the president’s carriage reached a side entrance to the Capitol, the two men stepped down and walked to the Senate chambers arm in arm. Buchanan was “pale, sad, nervous,” wrote a newspaperman on the scene. Lincoln’s face was flushed, his lips “compressed.” They waited while oaths were administered to two senators. “Mr. Buchanan sighed audibly and frequently,” wrote the correspondent, “Mr. Lincoln was grave and impassive as an Indian martyr.” Then they walked out into the daylight.
“We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln told the South as he stood there in front of the Capitol. “We must not be enemies.” He recognized the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees for slave owners and would not interfere with them, he said, but no state or states had the right to destroy the Union. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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IN CHARLESTON, THOSE “better angels” were nowhere to be seen. Only the Southern version of the inauguration was allowed into print, and that mocked the whole affair, especially the security precautions. “Everything that appears here is dressed with secession sauce,” Bunch wrote to Lyons.
As for Lincoln’s speech, it was taken as a provocation and “little short of a declaration of war against the South,” according to the Charleston Courier, which had once been the Mercury’s more sober counterpart but had now fallen into line with the secessionists. Bunch warned Lord Russell that military preparations in Charleston were being “pushed actively forward” under the command of “a Mr. Beauregard, previously a captain in the United States Engineers but now aBrigadier General in the service of the ‘Confederate States,’ who is said to be a very able officer and [was] the chief advisor of General Scott in the attack on the City of Mexico.”
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, or P. G. T. Beauregard, as he was known, had his headquarters only a couple of blocks up Meeting Street from Bunch’s house, and Bunch could hardly take a stroll toward the city center without passing young officers bustling in and out. If he turned in the other direction and walked down to the Battery, he saw across the gray waters of the bay the Carolinians building, day by day, an armor-plated floating gun platform with which to attack Maj. Anderson and his boys holed up in Fort Sumter. “I know nothing about the laws of war (or quasi-war),” Bunch wrote of this floating battery, “but the laws of common sense seem to dictate the propriety of [Anderson] blowing it out of the water.” Yet day after day that did not happen, and tensions continued to grow. “My house is about three miles as the crow—or the shell—flies from Fort Sumter,” Bunch told Lyons. “But unless the town is to be bombarded, I do not run much risk, as the attacking forts and batteries are seaward of me.” Everybody in the city had begun to make such calculations about if or when the fighting might touch them.
Bunch had become Her Majesty’s most important representative in the new Confederacy. He knew it, and he knew that Lord Lyons and Lord Russell knew it, and he would have liked a title to certify it somehow, and a raise in salary, of course. He dreamed of being a chargé d’affaires, a publicly acknowledged diplomat. But none of that led him to temper the contempt he expressed for just about everything the breakaway republic represented. The Charlestonians, he said, reminded him of a barnyard cock crowing defiance from atop a dunghill.
Bunch reported dutifully on the bait the Southerners were offering Britain in their attempt to gain quick recognition—the same basic incentives he and Rhett had talked about: low tariffs and a chance to do coastal trading. But he didn’t believe there to be much substance behind those promises. Georgia would still want its industries protected, and Louisiana felt the same way about its sugar.
The South was sending commissioners to London to plead its cause, and Bunch said he hoped they would not be received at all or, if they were, not warmly. “They go believing in their inmost hearts that we cannot do without this confounded Cotton, and that we will do anything or yield anything to get it. This is not a flattering estimate of us, and I own that it galls me to think that we have allowed these slave-holders even this ‘coign of vantage.’ ”
At the Confederacy’s very first cabinet meeting in Montgomery the members had voted almost unanimously to support a cotton boycott to punish Great Britain until it agreed to support secession. Only Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin argued against such a move. He was a much wiser and more worldly man than Bunch had given him credit for. Probably he was the only man in the cabinet who fully understood the financial implications of what was coming. He argued that the South’s cotton crop—its only significant source of cash—should be sold in Europe immediately for guns and gold in preparation for a long fight. But the others felt the whole affair would be over quickly. The new Confederate secretary of war, the intense and inept LeRoy Pope Walker of Alabama, had told his constituents that so little blood would be spilled, it could all be wiped up with a handkerchief.
Over the following weeks, the Confederate cabinet could not make out why the British were not racing to support the secessionist states that kept England’s port of Liverpool and the vast mills in Manchester so busy. One obvious reason, widely reported, was the surplus from the previous year’s record crop. If the war were short, the English mills wouldn’t hurt, and, important, the value of the fiber already in the British warehouses was soaring. Another reason was natural caution about getting involved in another country’s civil war and a reluctance to plunge into open armed conflict with the North. And then there was the problem of slavery and especially the slave trade with Africa, which, thanks to the reporting of Bunch and Lyons, remained an issue with British officials despite the official pronouncements in the new Confederate constitution. At one point Bunch’s ostensible friend William Henry Trescot, who’d had to deal with the issue of the African slave trade as acting U.S. secretary of state under Buchanan, took it upon himself to say publicly that the British should mind their own business.
“That’s not a reply at all,” Bunch told him; “it’s simply a growl.” It’s like a burglar telling a policeman to go walk his rounds and not to bother him, Bunch went on, but with a critical difference: the burglar didn’t make a commitment not to steal spoons, while the U.S. government and now the Confederate government did claim they were committed not to steal people from Africa. As the British saw things, the question of the African slave trade was very much their business.
The cotton boycott was evolving. The Confederate government did not really have the authority to enforce it, but many planters felt it their patriotic duty to hold back their production. Then the Confederate cabinet, which always preached the gospel of free trade, convinced itself it could coerce the British by levying an export duty on cotton. Bunch was overjoyed. “Every farthing so imposed is a bounty to us to grow it elsewhere. If we do not stir ourselves to do so after this fright, Manchester and Liverpool deserve to be burned.”
All this talk of boycotts and taxes was merely preliminary. It was obvious that when war came (there was now little question of “if”), the thunder on the American battlefields would echo around the world. It was also obvious that the first explosions would take place right there on the horizon, where the sky and the sea met at the edge of the Charleston Harbor, where more guns had now been positioned at Fort Moultrie to the north and on Morris Island to the south, ready and more than willing to open fire on Fort Sumter.