Chapter One
1. Sowing the Wind
THE senator was tall and handsome, with wavy hair to frame a proud ravaged face, and if hearty feeding had given him the beginning of a notable paunch he was erect enough to carry it well. He had the easy grace of a practiced orator — his speeches, according to spiteful enemies, were carefully rehearsed night after night before a mirror in his chambers, while an awed colored boy stood by with a lighted candle — and there was a great humorless arrogance about him, for he had never been blessed with a moment of self-doubt. He liked to say that he was in morals, not in politics. From this the logical deduction was that people who opposed him, numerous though they undoubtedly were, must be willfully wrong.
Such a deduction Senator Charles Sumner was quite capable of drawing for himself. He would draw it today in the Senate chamber. In his speech, he had told a friend, he would “pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative chamber.”
It was an ominous promise. The date was May 19, 1856, and although there was still a little time left it was running out fast, and angry words might make it run faster. Yet angry words were about the only kind anyone cared to use these days. Men seemed tired of the reasoning process. Instead of trying to convert one’s opponents it was simpler just to denounce them, no matter what unmeasured denunciation might lead to.
The point at issue was, at bottom, simple enough: how to legislate so that Kansas might someday become a state. But Kansas was a symbol rather than a territory. Men saw what they feared and hated, concentrated on its wide empty plains, and as they stared they were losing the ability to see virtue in compromise and conciliation. The man on the other side, whatever one’s vantage point, was beginning to look ominously alien. He could not easily be dealt with, and perhaps it was best simply to lash out at him. In the charged atmosphere thus created the lightest act could be fateful. All of the things that were slipping beyond hope of easy solution — sectional enmities, economic antagonisms, varying interpretations of the American dream, the tragic unendurable race problem itself — all of these, somehow, might hinge on what was done about Kansas, so that the wrong phrase in an enacting clause could mean earth’s best hope lost forever.
In Senator Sumner’s view the wrong phrase was on the verge of adoption. The bill which the Senate was about to pass would, as he saw it, mean that Kansas must eventually become a slave state. In addition, it would give a great deal of aid and comfort to slavery’s advocates, wherever they were. It was not to be thought of calmly; it was not merely wrong, it was an actual crime. Furthermore, it was no common crime; it was (he solemnly assured the Senate) a fearful thing, “the crime against nature, from which the soul recoils, and which language refuses to describe.” Yet if language could not describe it the senator could, and he would do so.
He was a man of breeding and education, given to much study of the classics; and he stood now in the Senate chamber, looking imperiously about him as one who has glimpsed the tables of the law on the mountaintop, and he dwelt extensively on “the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” The South, he said, was guilty of a “depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime.” Force had been used, he declared, “in compelling Kansas to this pollution.”1
The desk in front of Senator Sumner was empty. It belonged to Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and when Sumner first became a senator, white-haired Butler had been pleasant and cordial — so much so that Sumner wrote to a friend that he had learned, from the old gentleman’s kindness, “to shun harsh and personal criticism of those from whom I differ.” But that had been years ago, when men from Massachusetts and South Carolina could still exchange courtesies in the Senate chamber; and in any case Sumner was always ready to denounce even a close friend, and in the most unmeasured terms, if he suspected that the friend had fallen into error. Butler was a spokesman for slavery, he had had his part in the crime against nature, and the fascinating exercise of discussing political opposition in terms of sexual depravity could be carried on — by this bookish man, still unmarried at forty-five — with Butler as the target. Sumner addressed himself to the absent Butler.
The South Carolina senator considered himself a chivalrous knight, but Sumner had seen the truth: “He has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean the harlot slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”
There was quite a bit more of this, ranging all the way from Senator Butler to the ancient Egyptians, “who worshipped divinities in brutish forms,” with due mention of the “obscene idols” to which the Aztecs had made human sacrifices; the connection of these latter with the harlot slavery not being of the clearest. At one stage Sumner interrupted himself to cry: “Mr. President, I mean to keep absolutely within the limits of parliamentary propriety;” and then he went on, his speech still unfinished at the session’s end.
The senator managed to reach his conclusion the following day, reminding the presiding officer (perhaps unnecessarily) that “an immense space has been traversed,” and in closing he came back from brutish idols and obscene Aztecs to Senator Butler, from whom he had learned not to let political arguments get personal. There was not, he said, “any possible deviation from the truth” of which Butler was innocent, although fortunately these deviations were made in the heat of such passion “as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration.” Still, there it was: “The senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure — with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact.”2
A philippic, as he had promised. No single vote had been changed by it; the Senate would decide, at last, precisely as it would have done if he had kept quiet. But he had not been trying to persuade. No one was, these days; a political leader addressed his own following, not the opposition. Sumner had been trying to inflame, to arouse, to confirm the hatreds and angers that already existed. In the North there were men who from his words would draw a new enmity toward the South; in the South there were men who would see in this speaker and what he had said a final embodiment of the compelling reasons why it was good to think seriously about secession.
At the very end Sumner had a gloomy moment of insight.
The fight over Kansas, he said, spreading from the western plain to the Senate chamber, would spread still farther; would go to a nationwide stage “where every citizen will be not only spectator but actor.”3
There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike Fink and Yankee Doodle helped to father it, and Judge Lynch is one of its creations; and when it comes lumbering forth it can make the whole country step in time to its own frantic irregular pulse-beat.
Senator Sumner had invited it out with his fine talk. So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned. Yet these men need not have bothered. Rowdyism was coming out anyway, having been invited by men of the South as well as by men of the North, and the spirit of rowdyism was talking in the spirit of Sumner’s and Beecher’s exhortations without the fancy trimmings. It was saying now, south of the slavery line, that “we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” and in Kansas it had legislated that anyone who denied the legality of slave ownership in the territory should get five years in prison.4
In Kansas there was a town called Lawrence. It had existed for two years, and although it was so new, it was solid and substantial, with buildings of brick and stone, including a hotel that was massive enough to serve as a fort. (In point of fact, the hotel had been built with that end in mind.) The town was a piece of New England set down in the prairie, but it was a New England all distorted, as if someone were seeing bizarre dream-shapes that were slipping into nightmare. In place of white steeples and colonial doorways it had grim buildings and men who carried “Beecher’s Bibles” — Sharps rifles, named with a cynicism matching that of the reverend clergyman himself — and it was expressive of the stern New England purpose that had planted it there. It was named for a Massachusetts millowner who had given money to fight slavery, and it was the stronghold and rallying point of all Kansas settlers who believed that the extension of slavery must be stopped at the Missouri line.
As such, it became a focal point for hatred. The tension had been building up for months. There had been arrests and shootings and all manner of bloodthirsty threats and shouts of defiance, for nothing could be more hateful just then, to a certain attitude of mind, than the simple belief that one man ought not to own another man. A territorial grand jury with pro-slavery leanings had asked that the town’s leading citizens be jailed for treason, and it had added a rider to the effect that both of the town’s newspapers ought to be suppressed as public nuisances and that its fortress hotel should be torn down.
Now, on May 21 — one day after Senator Sumner had finished his excellent speech — there was a posse on hand to see that the grand jury’s thoughts were properly embodied in action. This posse numbered perhaps a thousand men. A great many of them came from Missouri, for Lawrence was not far from the state line, and they rejoiced in the collective title of Border Ruffians. They owed dim allegiance to a United States marshal who had certain arrests to make in Lawrence and they were heavily armed. Unlike most posses, they dragged along with them five cannon.
For once the people of Lawrence were on their good behavior. They offered no resistance when the marshal came in, and the arrests he wanted to make were made. The marshal thereupon dismissed his posse, which was immediately called back into service by a Kansas sheriff, a cover-to-cover believer in slavery, who announced himself as a law-and-order man and who said that he had a job of his own to do in Lawrence. The transformed posse was addressed briefly by former Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri, the great spokesman for slavery in the West, who cried: “Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead.” The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.5
Various rounds from the cannon were fired at the hotel. It had been well built — and the cannon, perhaps, were aimed and served inexpertly — and nothing in particular seemed to happen. The sheriff’s helpers then swarmed all over the town, setting fire to the hotel, raiding the two offending newspaper offices and dumping press and type into the river, ransacking homes and getting drunk and in general having a high old time. The home of a man who presumed to call himself the free-state governor of Kansas was burned, two men who apparently stood in the way were killed by flying pellets of lead, a certain amount of lesser damage was inflicted, various female free-staters were scared half out of their wits (though not, it would appear, actually harmed), and there was a great round of shouting and speechifying and wobbly-legged parading and rejoicing. If rowdyism could settle the matter, it had been demonstrated beyond recall that Kansas was slave territory and would someday be a slave state and that the writ that made it treason to doubt the legality of the pro-slavery government of the territory would run henceforth without interference.6
Lawrence was sacked by men with a genius for putting the worst foot forward. There were in Lawrence — and would arrive in droves in the next few days — certain newspaper correspondents who wrote from deep abolitionist conviction and who had access to the front pages of some of the country’s most influential newspapers. These men had something to write about now, and they would make the most of it. And there stood on the record now one more indication that the disagreement between sections might not finally be settled by the ordinary processes of reason, debate, and compromise.
Next day was May 22, and Senator Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber, the Senate having adjourned for the day. The senator was large, the fixed chair under his desk was high, and the base of the desk itself was screwed to the floor. The senator sat all hunched over, ankles hooked behind chair legs, intent on his correspondence. As always, he was serious, concentrating on the job at hand. He once told a friend that he never left his apartment to go to the Senate without taking a last look around, to make certain that everything he owned was just as he would wish it to be if the slave power should suddenly strike him down and he should never return to the place. Presumably he had taken such a look today.
The chamber where the Senate met was nearly empty. A few senators lounged about near the doorways, chatting, or worked at their desks. Sumner scribbled away, and then he realized that someone was standing beside him, trying to get his attention.
“I have read your speech twice over, carefully,” this man was saying. “It is a libel on South Carolina and on Senator Butler, who is a relative of mine.”
Then the man raised a walking stick high in the air and brought it down as hard as he could on Senator Sumner’s head.
The man with the cane was a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, nephew to Senator Butler; a youthful six-footer of robust frame, sometime cavalryman in the Mexican War. He struck again and again with a full-arm swing, and a man who saw it said that he came down with the cane like a dragoon using his saber and striking to kill. Caught between the chair and the immovable desk, Sumner tried desperately to get up. He was heard to gasp: “O Lord!” — and then, with a great convulsive heave, he wrenched the desk loose from its fastenings and reeled to his feet. Brooks struck again; the cane broke, and Brooks went on clubbing him with the splintered butt.
Now Sumner was on the floor, blood on his head and clothing, and men were running down the aisle to him. Brooks stopped beating him and strolled away, remarking: “I did not intend to kill him, but I did intend to whip him.” Sumner was helped to his feet and made his way to the lobby, where he fell on a sofa, half unconscious. A doctor came and dressed his wounds — the scalp was badly cut, the doctor said afterward, but beyond that the wound did not seem very severe — and someone helped Sumner to a carriage and got him back to those rooms that were always maintained in perfect order in anticipation of some violent incident.7
Sumner disrobed, found his clothing saturated with blood, and sent for his own doctor — who, after examination, took a much graver view of his injuries than the doctor in the Senate lobby had done. He pronounced Sumner’s condition most serious and ordered him to get into bed and stay there.
Concerning which there was much argument, then and later — the idea perhaps being that to pound a senator into speechlessness was no especial threat to the processes of democratic government unless the man’s life was actually endangered. The doctor who had treated him in the lobby declared contemptuously that as far as he could see Sumner might have ridden by carriage all the way to Baltimore without ill effect if he had wanted to — his wounds were not critical. But Sumner’s own doctor disagreed violently, and so did all of Sumner’s friends, and so for the matter of that did Sumner himself. For three years he did not return to the Senate chamber. He traveled to England and France for medical treatments, some of which were agonizing; his spine had been affected, the foreign specialists told him, and for a long time he walked and talked like a man who had had a partial stroke.
Thus there would be many who would consider Sumner a tragic martyr, just as others would call him a faker who had been properly beaten for loose talk; and young Brooks would be a hero in the South, the recipient of innumerable gifts of canes, one of which bore a plate with the inscription: “Hit him again.” He did not have long to live, this impulsive young congressman; within a year he would die of a bronchial infection, clawing at his throat for the air his lungs could not get; and in the days that were left to him he grew heartily sick of the kind of fame he had won, for he did not like to be considered a bully. He was a friendly, warmhearted man of good family, and he had grown up in a society in which a man might be held to render a physical account for any words he had used. He would have challenged Sumner to a duel, he said, if he had had any notion that the man would accept, but since he knew that he would not he had felt obliged to use either a cane or a horsewhip. He had chosen the cane, and undeniably he had done what he set out to do — that is, he had worked off his own anger and he had compelled Sumner to shut up — but the final effect was wholly disastrous.8
For this particular method of replying to Sumner’s speech was the one method above all others most certain to make many folk in the North overlook the provocation that the speech had contained. The slave power (it would be said) could not be reasoned with; the man who tried it would be bludgeoned almost to the point of death.
Violence in Kansas, violence in the Senate chamber; the infection was spreading.
The week was not over. One day there had been an elegantly phrased appeal to hatred, the next day a Kansas town had been sacked, the day after that a senator had been beaten to insensibility. Now it was May 24, forty-eight hours after the grim scene in the Senate chamber, and men with drawn swords were climbing through the shadows of early night in the ravines bordering Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas.
As weapons go, these swords had an odd history. They were shorter than cavalry sabers, straight in the blade, and some forgotten armorer had made them originally to government order as artillery broadswords. (In the old days all gunners wore swords for defense against attack by charging dragoons.) Then, in a sale of surplus property, the swords had been bought by a harebrained secret society in Ohio which called itself the Grand Eagles and which fuzzily imagined that one day it would attack and conquer Canada. The society’s plans came to nothing, and when a cranky, hard-mouthed farmer-turned-sheep-trader came through the state muttering that the way to keep slavery out of Kansas was to go out there and “meddle directly with the peculiar institution,” the swords had been turned over to him. They were made of good steel, and the society which had had such grand plans for them had had ornamental eagles etched on the blades.
Tonight the swords would be used, for the lanky Ohio farmer who proposed to meddle with the peculiar institution lived with strange fever-haunted dreams and felt an overwhelming compulsion to act on them. He was a rover, a ne’er-do-well, wholly ineffectual in everything he did save that he had the knack of drawing an entire nation after him on the road to unreasoning violence. He climbed the wooded ravines in the darkness this night, seven men at his heels — four of them were his own sons — and the naked metal of the swords glimmered faintly in the starlight. The man and his followers were free-state settlers from the town of Osawatomie. The grim farmer in the lead was named John Brown.9
They had taken up arms two or three days earlier, along with other men, in a dimly legal free-state militia company, to go to the defense of Lawrence. By good or evil chance they got there too late, and all of the company but Brown and his chosen seven disbanded and went home. But Brown was obsessed. He declared that “something must be done to show these barbarians that we too have rights,” and he and the seven turned a grindstone and ground their broadswords to a fine cutting edge. Some other militia leader saw and came over to warn Brown that he had better behave with caution.
“Caution, sir!” growled the old man. “I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”
The eight men headed for Pottawatomie Creek, where pro-slavery settlers lived; and as they went they met a man who had seen late dispatches from Washington, and this man told them how Bully Brooks had beaten Senator Sumner. One of the party wrote of this news long afterward: “The men went crazy — crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.”
For John Brown no more than a touch was needed. In some shadowy way the old man had got the idea that five free-state men had been killed at Lawrence, and he felt bound to balance the account. An eye for an eye, a life for a life; if five had been killed, five more must die; the logic that would kill an abstraction by striking at living men is direct, unthinking, and grisly.10
John Brown and his band went stumping along through the night. They were in pro-slavery land now, and any man they saw would be an enemy. They came to one lonely cabin, saw lamplight gleaming under the door, and pounded for admittance. There was a noise as if someone were cocking a gun and sliding the muzzle through a chink in the logs, and the men slipped away from there — it was not precisely open combat that they were looking for. They went on, and after a time they came to a cabin occupied by a family named Doyle.
The Doyles were poor whites from Tennessee. They had come to Kansas recently, and although they believed in slavery — as men counted their beliefs in those days — they did not like to live too close to it; it appears that they had migrated in order to get away from it. Brown hammered on the door. It was opened, and he ordered Doyle and Doyle’s two grown sons to come outside. The three men obeyed, the door was closed behind them, and Brown’s band led the three away from the cabin. Then there were quick muffled sounds, brief cries, silence and stillness and darkness, and Brown and his followers went off down the road. In the morning the bodies of the three Doyles were found lying on the ground, fearfully mangled. They had been hacked to death with the Grand Eagle swords, which were to have been employed in the conquest of Canada but which had found strange other use. The father had been shot in the head.
Next the men went to the home of one Wilkinson, a noted pro-slavery leader. Knock on the door again: Wilkinson, ready for bed, came and opened up without bothering to put on his boots. The threat of death was in the very look of the terrible old man who peered in from the night, and Mrs. Wilkinson — sick in bed with measles — cried and begged that her husband be spared. No pity: Wilkinson was taken out into the yard, the door was shut, and again the swords came down with full-arm swings — like the cane of Bully Brooks, only heavier and sharper. The men left Wilkinson dead in his dooryard and went on to another cabin.
Here they found William Sherman, Dutch Bill, known as one of the Border Ruffians. Dutch Bill, like the others, was dragged out into the darkness for the fearful work of darkness. In the morning he was found lying in a stream, his head split open, a great wound in his chest, one hand cut off — apparently he had put up a fight for his life.
It was past midnight now. Old Brown had planned to get five, and five he got. He and his men washed their swords in Pottawatomie Creek and went off to their homes.11
2. Where They Were Bound to Go
There were these things that happened in one week in the month of May 1856. The wind was being sown, and the hurricane would come later; and yet, all in all, these things were not so much causes as warnings — the lightning flashes that set evil scarlet flares against the black clouds that were banked up along the horizon. Somewhere beyond the lightning there was thunder, and the making of a great wind that would change the face of a nation, destroying much that men did not want destroyed. A doom was taking shape, and it seemed to be coming on relentlessly, as if there was nothing that anyone could do to prevent it. The republic that had been born in an air so full of promise that it might have been the morning of the seventh day was getting ready to tear itself apart.
Yet fate can move in two directions at once. At the same moment that it was driving men on to destroy the unity of their society it was also making certain that they would not be able to do it. Men who were whipping themselves up to the point where they would refuse to try to get along with one another were, at the same point of time, doing precisely the things that would bind them together forever whether they liked it or not. The impulse to disunion was coming to a land that, more or less in spite of itself, was in the very act of making union permanent.
The year 1856 saw many happenings that are much easier to interpret now than they were then. It saw wild appeals to anger and hate, convulsive moments of violence, heralds of a storm that would take five hundred thousand lives; it also saw the workings of a force greater than any storm, an incalculable thing that the wind and the lightnings could hardly touch. For even as they quarreled and learned to hate each other, Americans were in the act of entering upon a continental destiny. They were pouring out unfathomable energy upon a mighty land that was stronger than themselves. They were committing themselves to that land, and in the end it would have its way with them.
The steamers came down from Lake Superior that spring, carrying iron ore to furnaces on the lower lakes, and this was the first spring it had happened. Always before, Lake Superior had been landlocked — forever blue, forever cold, the scent of pine in the clean winds that blew over the water. In the mountains by the lake there was a great wealth of metals, but this wealth was locked up, out of reach, and the St. Mary’s River came tumbling down in white foam through a green untouched wilderness. A few schooners had been hauled overland, creaking on rollers, dozens of oxen leaning into heavy wooden yokes. Some of these vessels, once afloat on the upper lake, brought small deckloads of red iron ore down to the Soo, where it was shoveled into little cars that ran on wooden rails, with teams of horses to haul the cars down below the rapids, where the ore was loaded into schooners that had come up from Lake Erie.
In midsummer Indians would camp by the rapids, to cast their nets for whitefish, having week-long feasts in the little clearings by the riverbank. Some venturesome merchant from lower Michigan came up every year with huge iron kettles and hired the Indians to pick tubfuls of wild blackberries, from which he made jam to sell in the cities on the lower lakes; and the clear air would be fragrant with the odor of broiling fish and bubbling blackberry jam — as pleasant a scent, probably, as the north country ever knew. Jesuits in their black robes had been here in the old days, and trappers bound for the beaver country, and a handful of soldiers — soldiers of the French King once upon a time, and then British redcoats, and at last United States regulars. Below the rapids there was a meadow where sailors from the lower lakes schooners camped on the grass and sang fresh-water chanteys as they relaxed, backwoods-style, around the fire in the evening:
And now we are bound down the lakes, let ’em roar —
Hurrah, boys, heave her down!
And the river and the land about it were empty, the north wind murmuring across a thousand miles of untouched pine trees, the whole of it as remote (as Henry Clay once contemptuously pointed out in the Senate) as the far side of the moon, and as little likely to affect anything that happened in the rest of the country.1
All of that was changing. A canal had been dug around the rapids in the St. Mary’s, with two locks in it — men hauled the lock gates around by hand, and the water came burbling in to rock the little wooden vessels that were being locked through — and now the steamers could go all the way from Cleveland and Detroit to the new ports of the Marquette range, to bring ore down to the new furnaces. Eleven thousand tons of it would go down this year, ten times as much as had ever gone down before, and nothing would be the same again. Nothing would be the same because the canal and the shipping were the visible symbols of a profound and unsuspected transformation.
The puffing wooden steamers, stopping at the old sailors’ encampment to take on wood for fuel (three hundred cords of it at a time, for a fair bunkerful), were part of a vast process that nobody had planned and that nobody could stop; a process that was turning America into an entirely new sort of country which could do practically any imaginable thing under the sun except divide into separate pieces. In Ohio and Pennsylvania the blast furnaces and foundries and rolling mills were going up, railroads were reaching from the forks of the Ohio to the Lake Erie shore to take coal one way and iron ore the other, and there would be more trains and steamers and mills and mines, year after year, decade after decade. America would cease to have room for things like an empty wilderness at the Soo, with sailors lounging by campfires in lazy waiting, with Indians netting fish from a flashing river while ripe berries simmered in the iron kettles at the edge of a silent forest, the timeless emptiness of unclaimed land and unfretted leisure running beyond vision in every direction. It would have no room, either, for a feudal plantation economy below the Ohio, veneered with chivalry and thin romance and living in an outworn dream, or for the peculiar institution by which that economy lived, or for the hot pride and the wild impossible visions that grew out of it. The old ways were going, an overpowering compulsive force was being generated, and the long trails of smoke that lay on the curving blue horizon of Lake Huron were the signs of it.2
It was not just iron ore. The Illinois Central Railroad was finishing the seven hundred miles of its “charter lines,” running from Chicago down to the land of Egypt, where the Ohio met the Mississippi, with a crossline belting the black prairie from east to west with a terminus at Dunleith on the upper Mississippi. It was running fabulous “gothic cars” for sleepers, with staterooms and berths, and washrooms fitted in marble and plate glass, and in Chicago it had just built the largest railroad station in the world. (Too large by far, said eastern railroaders, and here on the edge of nowhere not half of the station would ever be used. Within a decade it would be outgrown, needing enlargement.) In two years the railroad had sold more than eight hundred thousand acres of land to settlers, and its elevators on the river were already stacked with wheat brought down by steamer from Minnesota, where newcomers in this one year would take up a million acres of new farm land.
Wheat was the word, along with iron. America was beginning to feed Europe, and the price of grain had gone up and up. Farmers were driving a hundred miles or more, in Illinois and Wisconsin, to reach railroad stations and lake ports with wagonloads of grain, and there were long lines at the elevators; often enough a man had to wait twenty-four hours before he could discharge his load. On the lakes a grain schooner could earn her cost in a single season. With new mechanical reapers and with steel moldboard plows, men could till more land and reap bigger harvests than ever before, and the lake and river states were drawing people in by the thousand, from the East and from the South and from faraway Europe.3
For here was something new in the world, a great land promising everything men had hoped for, the very air and sunlight seeming keener and brighter than the air and the light in other places. On the docks at New York were crowds of immigrants, many of them knowing no single word of English except for some place name like Milwaukee or Chicago; somehow they found their way to the comfortless trains that would take them West, and at Buffalo they boarded the creaking side-wheelers, barrels of bedding and crockery and crates of furniture on the decks, wagon wheels lashed in the rigging, to finish the journey to something that they could find nowhere else on earth.
In addition to wheat and iron, there were people. Not all of them came from overseas. In America there was a continual surging and shifting, with New Englanders going to Ohio, Kentuckians to Illinois, Hoosiers to the black-soil country west of the Mississippi. They were looking for the same thing the immigrants were looking for — a chance to make life a little better for themselves — and they saw their destiny in this great western land tied by natural law to the destiny of the whole country.
In this year 1856 there was a typical family opening a new farm in Iowa, and this family’s story expresses the whole of it.
For a quarter of a century this family had lived in Indiana, settling there when a good farm could be bought from the government for two dollars an acre, building in the wilderness a home that was almost entirely self-sufficient; one man recalled that “we could have built a Chinese wall around our home and lived comfortably, asking favors of no man.” This was sturdy frontier independence, romantic enough when seen from a distance, but nobody wanted to put up with it any longer than he really had to. For there were no markets — “no demand and no price.” A drove of hogs might be chivvied 150 miles through the woods to Cincinnati, to be sold there for $1.50 per hundred pounds; what could be bought with the money thus obtained was costly, with calico selling for 40 cents a yard and muslin for 75 cents, and with tea costing $1.50 a pound.4
As the western country opened, this isolation ended. As roads were built and people moved in and cities and towns sprang up, with steamboat and railroad lines handy, new markets were opened; crops could be sold for a decent sum, necessities and luxuries could be bought; and the mere fact that there were people all around brought prosperity, so that this particular family at last sold its Indiana farm for $100 an acre and moved on to Iowa, to do the whole thing over again.
As they went west they saw thousands of others doing the same, and a young man remarked that “Old America seemed to be breaking up and moving west.”5 The die had already been cast. In the East men who looked to the Pacific coast looked overland now, and not around the Horn. The great day of the clippers was over. The noble winged Sea Witch was a forgotten wreck on a reef off the Cuban coast, the Flying Cloud lay idle at her wharf for want of a charter, and it no longer paid to build ships that could advertise ninety days to California. California was peopled and fully won, the great leap to the Pacific had been made, and what was important now was to fill in the empty space.
A few years earlier Stephen A. Douglas had tried to say it in the Senate: “There is a power in this nation greater than the North or the South — a growing, increasing, swelling power that will be able to speak the law to this nation and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the Great West — —”6
Yet men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on. In 1856 what seemed to be important was the great and sublimely irrelevant argument, the great fear and the great surge of emotion; unforgivable words self-righteously spoken, blows brought down from behind on a defenseless head, a drunken mob rioting across a frontier town, long knives slashing and hacking in the moonlight. Out of this, heralded by this and much more like it, men would pay half a million lives to go, finally, where they were bound to go anyway.
3. Light over the Marshes
The substance and the shadow went in opposite directions, and it was hard to say which was real and which was no more than a shred of mist blowing from the land of haunted impossible dreams; and there was, meanwhile, a great pentagon of masonry built on a reef at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, where the orderly sequence of events was about to be crossruffed by exploding violence.
This was Fort Sumter, which had been built in a routine way to adorn the coast of a country that expected never to go to war, and the fort stood at the precise spot where the hurricane was going to break. In the fort there was a company of artillerists of the regulararmy, seventy-odd of them in all, commanded by a grave Kentucky major named Robert Anderson. They had hired out to do a job, and in the ordinary course of things the job was simple enough: to stand guard over government property, looking vigilantly to seaward for an enemy who would never come by water, and to walk post in a military manner permitting no nuisances. When the early months of 1861 came along this routine job developed an extraordinary tension.
For the bitterly divided men who, unable to phrase a nobler appeal, had asked fear and anger to judge between them were being compelled to cope with an issue greater than any of them. They had not chosen to cope with it; they had been willing to go to almost any length to avoid coping with it; but it was there, and now it had to be faced. At the very bottom of American life, under its highest ideals and its most dazzling hopes, lay the deep intolerable wrong of slavery, the common possession not of a class or a section but of the nation as a whole. It was the one fatally limiting factor in a nation of wholly unlimited possibilities; whatever America would finally stand for, in a world painfully learning that its most sacred possession was the infinite individual human spirit, would depend on what was done about this evil relic of the past. Abraham Lincoln had once called it “the great Behemoth of danger,”1 and now it was forcing men into war.
Yet for a long time men would refuse to admit that this was the dreadful inevitable beneath all of their differences. They would look instead at symbols; at swaggering Border Ruffians, at gaunt John Brown, or at something else. And in April 1861, Fort Sumter itself had suddenly become the most compelling of these symbols.
When southern men looked at the fort they saw a squat, ugly obstacle standing in the path of romantic destiny, the visible sign that there were cold and designing folk who would not let the lovely, white-pillared, half-imaginary past perpetuate itself; they lined the mud flats and the sand dunes around Charleston Harbor with batteries, and eager young men in gray uniforms tossed palmetto flags into the wind, until Major Anderson at last calculated that if his government ever tried to force its way in to rescue him it would need all of its navy and an army of twenty thousand men besides.
Most Northerners, so far, were hardly looking at the fort at all. Secession had been threatened for years and now it was here, but there was something unreal about the situation. Sumter was no more than an unpleasant reminder of a distasteful possibility. Yet there it was, a solid block of a thing, holding the national flag in the light between Charleston and the sunrise, and the indifference of the North was only apparent. For beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the nation was going to go on growing — in size, in power, in everything a man could think of — and in that belief there was a might and a fury that would take form instantly at the moment of shock. If just one of these encircling guns should be fired an immeasurable emotional flood would be released.
But for the time there was an uneasy equilibrium. The regulars did their best to go on as usual. Some months earlier they had noticed that the people of Charleston were courting them — were courting even the enlisted men, who in ordinary times had a dog’s berth and expected nothing better and so were not courted by anybody. There is a record of a banquet in Charleston (held in the autumn of 1860, before things had quite come to a head) with high privates seated with their betters at a great table, and one mercenary in uniform, full of good food and southern whiskey, got up on the table and stalked at full stride from one end to the other, scattering meat and drink and broken china, scandalizing the elect; yet pride was swallowed and nothing was done to him, because hired soldiers might change flags if they were treated softly. In the end the hired soldiers changed no flags; instead they moved their own flag from obsolete Fort Moultrie, which could never be defended, into Fort Sumter, which perhaps could be; and now they waited in their stronghold, in a situation odd enough for anyone.2
There was no war. As far as the government in Washington was concerned, the men in Sumter had not an enemy in the world. Yet they were in fact besieged, and as they worked to perfect their defenses they knew perfectly well that the besiegers could take the place any time they cared to make the effort. The food the garrison ate, the mail it received, the very orders it got from the War Department, all came to it entirely by sufferance of the southern Confederacy — which clearly was refraining from bombarding the fort into submission only because it seemed possible that Washington could be pressured into giving it away without a fight.
This seemed possible to Winfield Scott, among others — Winfield Scott, commanding general of the United States Army, old and pompous and dropsical but pretty much all soldier just the same. Early in the winter Scott sat at his desk in Washington, proudly wrote “headquarters of the Army” at the top of a sheet of paper, and expressed himself in a memorandum to the Secretary of War. As always, Scott wrote of himself respectfully in the third person:
“Lieutenant General Scott, who has had a bad night, and can scarcely hold up his head this morning, begs to express the hope to the Secretary of War” — that Fort Sumter be held, provisioned, reinforced and given the help of a couple of first-class warships. Two days later the old general wrote a letter to President James Buchanan, who was all but totally immobilized by the twin beliefs that the southern states could not legally secede and that the Federal government could not legally stop them if they tried it. To Buchanan, General Scott wrote:
“It is Sunday; the weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal he hopes for the President’s forgiveness” — and, in fine, it was vital to reinforce the Sumter garrison at once, sending in more weapons and stores and calling on the navy for help.3
All of this got nobody anywhere. To be sure, Sumter was not abandoned and a steamer was sent down with stores and men; but it was not convoyed by naval forces, the coastal batteries drove it away, and as spring came Major Anderson and his men were still locked up in their fort. They did what they could to make the place strong, bricking up embrasures that they could not defend and hoisting the heavy barbette guns to their emplacements on top of the fort, and they ate their way through their dwindling supply of provisions. In mid-March there was an odd incident, which went all but unnoticed: a young Negro slave, sensing no doubt that what with one thing and another there might be a new meaning for men like himself in ground held by the United States Army, broke away from his lawful owner in Charleston, stole a canoe, and in the darkness paddled out to Fort Sumter to find refuge. The officers there promptly sent him back to his owner, not realizing that they had in their hands, months before the expression would have any meaning, the first of thousands upon thousands of contrabands.4
On the same day President Abraham Lincoln, newly inaugurated, wrote to his Secretary of War:
“Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it?”
Under all of the circumstances, the Secretary replied, it would not be wise; would not, in fact, even be possible. The best brains in the army held that it would take an expedition of such size and scope that four months would pass before it could even be assembled.5 Major Anderson called for a report on the quantity of food remaining in the fort and learned that there were six barrels of flour, six more of hardtack, three of sugar, two of vinegar, two dozen of salt pork, and various odds and ends, including three boxes of candles. Out in the marshes the sandbag parapets kept on growing, with black metal visible in the apertures, and the ring grew tighter and tighter. Then the garrison was notified that no more supplies could be bought in Charleston. Mr. Lincoln sent a messenger to tell the governor of South Carolina that Washington meant no particular harm but that a cargo of food for Sumter’s garrison would be coming down directly, and then the government of the Confederate States of America formally demanded of Major Anderson that he haul down his flag and surrender.6
Major Anderson replied that he would obey no such demand. He added, however, that if the Confederates cared to be a little patient his men would be out of food in a very few days and would have to give up anyway. Trim officers in swords and sashes went back and forth between the fort and the encircling batteries that evening. There was grave, courtly politeness between besieged and besiegers, with solemn handshakes and farewells on the fort’s wharf by torchlight, and word came back at last that what the major had said was not good enough: he must surrender now, and do it under the gun. This, said the major, he could not do; and so, after midnight, the final word came out from the mainland: Our batteries will open on the fort in one hour precisely.7
War: the word had been said, and the business could go just one way. In the black hours of early morning the United States officers stood at the parapet atop Fort Sumter and looked off in the darkness toward the place where, they knew, the nearest guns had been planted. The candle flame was guttering out fast and it was very close to the socket, but as long as it continued to flicker the America of the old days still lived, the America that was cemented to a heritage from the past with a dream born of pride and careless waste, of lazy beauty and cruelty, its face turned away from the future — a dream that would begin to die the moment its impassioned defenders pulled on the lanyard of one of the surrounding cannon.
And at last there was a quick flash, like heat lightning, off beyond the unseen marshland, and a sullen red spark climbed up the black sky, seemed to hang motionless for a final instant directly overhead, and then came plunging down, to explode in great light and rocking sound that would reverberate across the land and mark an end and a beginning.