Throughout the decade of the 1850s, the momentum seemed to shift constantly back and forth between politics and practical action, between the men in frock coats and other men who would not hesitate at all to dirty their hands in any number of ways. John Brown was one such man. He had perpetrated the Pottawatomie killings in Kansas back in 1856. He had also led antislavery militia in battle there against their proslavery opponents. After Kansas had grown quiet, Brown had led armed raids into Missouri, liberating a handful of slaves and appropriating their owners’ horses as well as punishment for the crime of slaveholding and further support for the cause of freedom. Thereafter he had taken his family to live in a racially mixed upstate New York community, an extreme rarity at that time, specifically for the purpose of showing his solidarity with African Americans.
All the while Brown was planning what he confidently believed would be his greatest stroke against the slave power. He would lead a band of abolitionist fighters into slave territory somewhere in the southern Appalachians. There escaping slaves would flock to join him, and he would organize them into a freed-slave republic that would, he hoped, grow until it overthrew the slave-tolerant U.S. government and replaced the imperfect U.S. Constitution with its own charter, over which Brown had labored many an hour by candlelight in Kansas and New York. When Brown presented the plan to his friend, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the latter was appalled. The plan seemed like suicide and would discredit the abolitionist movement. Nevertheless Brown and his small band of adherents, both white and black, forged ahead.
In October 1859 he led them to the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), seizing the undefended facility and taking hostages. Brown hesitated before leading his raiders away from Harpers Ferry, however, and soon found himself surrounded by Virginia militia. No slaves came to join him. That particular section of Virginia contained relatively few slaves. Instead of help from those he had hoped to free, Brown soon found that federal authority had arrived in the person of U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, supported by a company of U.S. Marines, hastily shipped up from the Washington navy yard. When Brown refused Lee’s summons to surrender, Lee sent in the marines, who successfully stormed Brown’s remaining enclave within the arsenal.
Though badly wounded, Brown survived, and Virginia authorities lost no time in arraigning and trying him for treason against the state of Virginia and other crimes. The trial’s outcome was never in doubt. Guaranteed a place on the gallows before year’s end, Brown conducted himself with impressive dignity, winning the grudging respect of his captors and the admiration of many across the North who had initially recoiled from the violent and lawless nature of his raid. Southerners took note of and exaggerated the degree of northern sympathy for Brown. The most radical of slavery advocates, known as Fire-Eaters, warned that he was a harbinger of the bloody intentions of the abolitionists toward all white southerners.
One Fire-Eater, Virginia agricultural writer Edmund Ruffin, acquired some of the pikes, or spears, Brown had brought with him in hopes of arming the slave allies who never came. Ruffin sent one pike to each southern state capitol as a graphic reminder to his fellow white southerners of what the North supposedly wanted to do to them and their families. When Virginia authorities hanged Brown that December, surrounded by almost the whole of the state’s militia, the septuagenarian Ruffin, complete with flowing white hair, had himself temporarily inducted into the corps of cadets of the Virginia Military Institute so that he could be on hand to have the pleasure of seeing the famous abolitionist fighter twist in the wind. Commanding the contingent of cadets was one of their professors, stern Presbyterian and Mexican War veteran Thomas J. Jackson. Jackson admired the courage and calmness with which Brown faced death but disapproved of his cause.
Brown’s raid and the subsequent publicity surrounding his trial and execution, including displays of public mourning in some northern cities, culminated in an entire decade of political and sometimes violent and bloody sectional strife over the issue of slavery. Each clash, whether in the national capital or in places like Lawrence, Kansas, or Harpers Ferry, Virginia, had intensified the bitter feelings between North and South. Thus polarized, the nation faced the election of 1860.
The Democratic convention took place in Charleston, South Carolina, the most extreme proslavery city in the most extreme proslavery region of the most extreme proslavery state in the Union. Local crowds packing the visitors’ gallery roared their approval for every proslavery speech and jeered any mention of the candidacy of Stephen Douglas, whom they hated for having denied the inherent right of slavery to go into all of the territories regardless even of the majority vote of white inhabitants.
Through more than one hundred ballots, the convention could not achieve the two-thirds vote needed to make a nomination. Southerners had more than one-third of the delegates committed to stopping Douglas or any candidate not completely dedicated to slavery expansion. Douglas had a solid majority of delegates behind him, and this time his supporters, many of them from the Midwest, were tired of backing down to the demands of the slave power every four years—and then paying the price for it at the polls in the North. Unable to nominate a candidate, the convention turned instead to selecting a platform, but when the majority refused a southern demand that the federal government actively protect slavery in every territory, southern delegates walked out. An attempt to restore party unity at a special convention in Baltimore several weeks later also broke up over the issue of slavery, and the severed wings of the Democratic Party nominated rival presidential tickets—Vice President John C. Breckinridge for the southern Democrats, Douglas for what was left of the national Democratic Party.
During the period between the first Democratic convention in Charleston and that party’s attempt to reconstitute itself in Baltimore, the Republican Party met in Chicago, Illinois, and, passing over front-runner William H. Seward as being perhaps too controversial a figure, instead nominated Lincoln. The Illinois lawyer had seemed like the ideal candidate, dedicated to the party’s cause of halting the spread of slavery yet without the harsh edge that public perception attributed to Seward. In a speech in New York City the preceding February, Lincoln had showed an ability to articulate Republican principles in surprisingly clear and eloquent language, arguing persuasively that what the Republicans wanted was a return to the thought and policies of the founders of the republic, who had wished to contain slavery so that it would be “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln also had common-man appeal and a set of very savvy political managers.
The 1860 campaign was not to be a three-way race. As if the field of candidates were not already crowded enough, a group of former southern Whigs, dissatisfied with both the Democrats and the Republicans, held a convention and formed itself into the Constitutional Union Party. The new party nominated John Bell of Tennessee as its presidential candidate—the fourth major-party candidate in that year’s race—and, in the best of old-time Whig tradition, declined to adopt any platform other than “the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws”—a creed to which every party claimed to subscribe. Voters understood that what the Constitutional Unionists stood for was a moderate proslavery position without the Fire-Eaters’ constant demands for slavery expansion and strident threats of secession if their demands were not met or their candidate was not elected.
The election turned into two separate two-way races: Bell versus Breckinridge in the South and Lincoln versus Douglas in the North. Breckinridge carried the Deep South and Bell the Upper South. Douglas garnered more votes than either but carried only Missouri and half of New Jersey. Lincoln was the top vote getter, edging out Douglas in all the rest of the free states and locking up an electoral majority with scarcely more than 39 percent of the popular vote. Curiously, this was not because his opposition was split three ways. Even if all the votes cast for all three of Lincoln’s opponents had been cast for one man, Lincoln would still have won since he carried nearly all of the northern states by moderate to narrow margins but garnered virtually no votes at all in the South.
Throughout the campaign, southerners, particularly the Fire-Eaters, had loudly and frequently repeated that they would take their states out of the Union if any “Black Republican” was elected. At news of Lincoln’s triumph, secessionists in all of the slave states went to work to make good on their threat. By a campaign of manipulation and voter intimidation, they strove to bring about secession. South Carolina led the way on December 20, 1860, and thereby undercut the attempts of southern unionists to stop the momentum for secession by persuading southern voters to wait until all of the slave states could go out together. Though a two-week delay followed, South Carolina’s action was like the bursting of a levee, as one after another of the slave states seceded. During January 1861, five more Deep South states declared themselves out of the Union, and Texas, on February 1, became the seventh state to do so.
Later that month representatives of the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, and constituted themselves the Confederate States of America, electing as their president Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis. Davis, a West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran, originally coveted a military appointment in the newly forming Confederate army, but he accepted the presidency and prepared to lead the new slaveholders’ republic. The Confederacy, seeking further legitimacy, adopted a constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution but altered to recognize slavery specifically. They knew what their revolution was intended to protect, even if some of them would later deny it and claim they were fighting for state rights. Another difference from the U.S. Constitution was that the Confederate constitution limited its president to one six-year term without eligibility for reelection. Davis was to serve as provisional president until a regular president could be elected in the fall of 1861 and inaugurated the following February. As it turned out, no candidate opposed him, and the Mississippian was elected to succeed himself and become the Confederacy’s first—and only—regular president.
While the Deep South states seceded and formed a rival government, lame-duck President Buchanan did nothing. In the face of his idleness, rebellious state militia throughout the Deep South seized every federal installation in those states except for two: irrelevant Fort Pickens outside the harbor of Pensacola, Florida, and all-too-relevant Fort Sumter inside the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Much to Buchanan’s dismay, the commander of the seventy-six-man U.S. Army garrison at Charleston had moved his troops on Christmas night 1860 from the indefensible old Fort Moultrie to the new and modern (as well as incomplete) Fort Sumter, where it would be much more difficult for rebellious militia to bring him to grips. Southern leaders cried foul and demanded that Sumter be evacuated as part of an overall U.S. government acceptance of the secession of the southern states. Such acceptance did not seem unlikely in view of the fact that Buchanan, in his last State of the Union Address, had proclaimed that states had no right to secede and that the federal government had no right to stop them if they did.
Public opinion in the North was divided. Some northern Democrats, naturally hostile to Lincoln and his platform of limiting slavery expansion, were inclined to sympathize with the seceding states. Horace Greeley, influential editor of the New York Tribune and one of the most prominent Republican journalists in the country, urged, “Let erring sisters go in peace,” and some other Republicans took up his refrain. This was not so much because they desired to see the Union broken up as because they were afraid that the Buchanan administration would knuckle under to the southern threat of secession and agree to some sort of compromise that might negate all that antislavery Americans had achieved in the recent campaign.
The Cotton South seemed unified and determined, the North confused and uncertain. The Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri—seemed to teeter on the brink of secession, as the Fire-Eaters in those states had fallen just short of their goal of rushing secession past a skeptical electorate. Secessionists in the Upper South tended to believe that what their cause needed was some aggressive action on the part of the Confederacy to demonstrate that it truly was independent and was not going to put up with any trifling from the Lincoln administration. As Virginia Fire-Eater Roger Pryor told a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, the way to bring Virginia out of the Union and into the Confederacy was to “strike a blow.”
In a demoralized Washington, D.C., guarded by large numbers of U.S. Army troops deployed by aged General in Chief Winfield Scott to prevent any attempt at disrupting the inauguration, Lincoln took office March 4, committed to preserving the Union intact. Standing in front of the capitol with its unfinished dome, Lincoln read an inaugural address couched in conciliatory terms. He was duty bound to preserve the Union, Lincoln explained, but he would not be the aggressor. He would not attack the southern states or their institution of slavery unless they attacked first. He would enforce all of the laws, even the Fugitive Slave Act, but otherwise he would respect the rights of the states within the Union. He would maintain current garrisons like Fort Sumter, but they would attempt neither to collect the tariff nor to take any other action against the secessionists. In conclusion, Lincoln showed some of the eloquence that has led scholars to consider him the most adept user of the English language of any American statesman:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our 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.1
White southerners were for the most part as unmoved by Lincoln’s eloquence as they were by his restraint. His statement that secession was not a constitutional right, guaranteed to the states and to be accepted without question by the federal government, they characterized as a virtual declaration of war.
On taking over the presidency, Lincoln found the nation’s situation even worse than he had imagined. The army was small and scattered, most of it defending the western frontier against Indians. The navy was also small and scattered, most of it patrolling against the Atlantic slave trade. The aged commanding general had little encouragement to offer. Winfield Scott had been one of the greatest military minds of his time but his time was most emphatically passed by 1861. Once a majestic sight in full dress uniform, the six-foot-four-inch Scott had grown so old, fat, and gouty that he could not mount a horse but had to be hoisted onto its back by something like a small crane. Scott told Lincoln that getting an expedition through to Fort Sumter would require more men than the army had and counseled giving up the fort. Most of the president’s cabinet agreed, including the forceful and cunning Secretary of State Seward, who thought that he should have been president instead of Lincoln. Worst of all, reports from Fort Sumter indicated that the garrison was running out of food. If not resupplied within a few weeks, Anderson and his men would have no choice but surrender or starvation, and surrender of the fort would be read in the South and in the rest of the world as the government’s acceptance of southern secession.
A desperate Lincoln seized on a plan presented by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox. What army leadership thought impossible, the navy proposed to do: get a relief expedition through to Fort Sumter. Though most of the fleet was unavailable, one reasonably powerful unit was on hand in the side-wheel steamer USS Powhatan, mounting sixteen guns, eleven of them heavy. It would form the nucleus of a task force whose mission would be resupplying Sumter. If the Rebels offered no resistance, Powhatan and the other warships would wait outside the harbor while a supply ship carried in the needed rations. If the Rebels opened fire, then Powhatan and the smaller warships, such as ten-gun steam sloop of war USS Pawnee, would, in theory at least, shoot their way into the harbor and see to the insertion not only of rations but of additional troops as well. A Union agent would alert Anderson of the expedition’s approach so that the fort’s garrison could cooperate with its own heavy guns. At the same time, a letter from Lincoln went to South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens (pointedly not to Jefferson Davis, whose office as president of the self-styled Confederate States Lincoln did not recognize), blandly informing him that an expedition would be resupplying Fort Sumter and that no shot would be fired or any troops, guns, or ammunition inserted unless the attempt was resisted.
Meanwhile, Seward was playing a deep game of his own. Convinced that the southern states could somehow be convinced to give up the idea of secession if only they were placated about Fort Sumter, he had entered into an indirect, unofficial, and completely unauthorized negotiation with several Confederate commissioners whom Davis had sent to Washington for that purpose. Seward hinted broadly to the Confederate agents that Fort Sumter would be abandoned, a decision he had no authority to make. When he learned of Lincoln’s authorization of Fox’s plan to resupply the fort, Seward drew up an order that he cunningly got Lincoln to sign without knowing what it was, diverting Powhatan to other duty. When Lincoln discovered the move and ordered Seward to revoke the order, Seward did so over his own signature. The ship’s commander obeyed the order signed by the president rather than that signed by the secretary of state, and before Lincoln could discover this second subterfuge, Powhatan was beyond recall and unavailable for the expedition.
Lincoln could see little choice but to go ahead with the expedition anyway. It lacked the firepower now to shoot its way into the harbor, but the attempt to insert the unarmed supply ship was the last chance for preserving peace and Union by maintaining the status quo in Charleston harbor. Lincoln knew that, given the aggressiveness of the southern leadership, the chance for peace was slim, but he had to try. There was little else for him to do other than accept the dismemberment of the United States, and that he would not do.
On receiving Lincoln’s notification of the planned relief expedition, Governor Pickens had immediately forwarded it to Jefferson Davis in Montgomery, the Confederate capital. Davis was determined to have Fort Sumter as a symbol of Confederate sovereignty. He hoped to get it peaceably but was quite willing to do so by force if necessary. On learning that the relief expedition was on the way, he ordered the commander of the Confederate forces ringing Charleston harbor, Louisianan Pierre G. T. Beauregard, to demand the fort’s immediate surrender and, if that were refused, to blast it into submission.
Beauregard was a veteran of the prewar U.S. Army who, like many southern officers, had resigned his commission when his state seceded and taken a commission in the new Confederate army. An 1838 graduate of West Point, where Robert Anderson had been his artillery instructor, Beauregard was a skillful military engineer who had supervised the arrangement of dozens of batteries of Confederate guns trained on Fort Sumter.
In response to Davis’s order, Beauregard, on the afternoon of April 11, 1861, sent a trio of staff officers in a small boat with a flag of truce to demand Anderson’s surrender. The leader of the Confederate delegation was Colonel James Chesnut, until a few months earlier a U.S. senator from South Carolina. To Chesnut’s summons to surrender, Anderson replied that his orders would not allow him to give up the fort at that time but that if the Confederates waited long enough, lack of provisions would force him to do so. Chesnut and his cohorts piled back into their boat and took this message back to Beauregard, who in turn telegraphed it to Montgomery.
Davis had his secretary of war reply that if Anderson would specify a time when he would evacuate the fort, Beauregard could hold off on the attack. Back into the boat went Chesnut and the other two staff officers for the long pull across the harbor. By the time they reached the fort, it was well after midnight on the morning of April 12. When Anderson met with them and heard their demand for a date to evacuate the fort, he gave April 15, if resupply did not reach him first. Everyone knew that the Union relief expedition was scheduled to arrive before then, so Chesnut took the responsibility, though very much in keeping with the wishes of Beauregard and Davis, of refusing Anderson’s terms and informing him that Confederate guns would open fire on the fort in one hour.
Once again plying their boat across the harbor, the three Confederate officers proceeded to the nearest Confederate battery, located on James Island, and gave the order to fire. Among the Confederate soldiers there was Virginia Fire-Eater Edmund Ruffin, still sporting his long, white hair. Having had himself temporarily inducted into the Virginia Military Institute so that he could have the pleasure of watching John Brown hang seventeen months before, Ruffin had now temporarily joined a South Carolina unit and was thus on hand for the first shot of the war. Indeed, according to some stories he actually fired the first shot, though this is generally discounted. It was 4:30 a.m., on Friday, April 12, when the guns on James Island roared into action, and the rest of the Confederate guns around the harbor quickly joined them in opening fire.
Low on ammunition, Anderson held his fire for the first several hours, then had his men reply sparingly. Outside the harbor, Fox and his relief expedition stood by helplessly, unable to force their way to the fort. By the afternoon of April 13, with ammunition almost gone and flames out of control inside the fort, threatening its powder magazine, Anderson surrendered. He and his seventy-six men had done all that could have been expected of them and by putting up a stout fight had demonstrated that the United States was not willingly acquiescing in the surrender of its fort. Amazingly, the thirty-four-hour-long bombardment had killed no one. Beauregard, always an admirer of the chivalrous niceties of war as it had been practiced in an earlier age, allowed Anderson to fire a fifty-gun salute to his flag in a formal surrender ceremony the following day before leaving the fort to board Fox’s ship and head north. Ironically, a gunner firing the salute accidentally ignited a pile of cartridges, and two U.S. soldiers died in the blast.
News of Fort Sumter shocked the nation, and both North and South reacted strongly. As Lincoln would later explain the situation, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”2
On April 15, the day following the surrender ceremony in Charleston, Lincoln, following the Constitution as well as Washington’s example in the Whiskey Rebellion, issued a proclamation: “Whereas the laws of the United States have been and are opposed in several States by combinations too powerful to be suppressed in the ordinary way,” the president requested the states to provide seventy-five thousand militia for federal service. Proslavery governors in Upper South states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky indignantly refused, but the response across the North was more than enthusiastic. The flag had been fired on, and the North rose up in a surprisingly unified reaction. Stephen Douglas pledged his support to Lincoln in suppressing treason. Patriotic rallies took place in scores of towns, and men flocked to enlist. Recruiting quotas were exceeded almost overnight, and several state governors begged Lincoln to accept additional regiments and in some cases kept those regiments on hand as state troops until the federal government, in due time, was more than happy to receive them. The first seventy-five thousand militia were limited by constitutional restraints to a maximum term of ninety days’ service.
Reaction in the slave states that had not previously declared themselves out of the Union was quite different and proved the truth of Pryor’s advice that the South Carolinians “strike a blow.” Once it became clear that they would have to fight either for a slave republic or for a republic in which slavery might be limited, Upper South residents, especially those who held political power, had no doubts as to which side they would take. On April 17 the Virginia state convention voted for secession. Theoretically the vote was subject to ratification in a state referendum to be held the following month, but by that time Virginia’s secessionist governor had already all but incorporated the state into the Confederacy. Within a few weeks, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had followed suit.
The part of the Upper South known as the border states—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—was divided internally. Kentucky and Missouri had secessionist governors with moderately Unionist legislatures. In Maryland, those relationships were reversed. Baltimore and the eastern counties of Maryland, with the highest slave population, were the hotbed of secessionism in that state. When on April 19 the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first of the northern regiments responding to Lincoln’s call, passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington, trouble broke out. Rail connections through Baltimore were discontinuous, and troops traveling to Washington from the North had to detrain at one station and march through the streets of Baltimore to another station where they could entrain for the national capital. As the Massachusetts men did so, an angry secessionist mob attacked them, throwing stones and firing pistols. The soldiers shot back, and when the fray had ended, four soldiers and twelve civilians were dead.
The mayor of Baltimore and the governor of Maryland demanded that Lincoln allow no further Union troops to pass through the city and inflame the citizens and, when Lincoln refused, had the railroad bridge burned so that none could. Secessionist Marylanders cut the telegraph wires leading north from Washington. This made for some very tense days in the capital, cut off as it was from communication with the North or from the arrival of any additional troops. Benjamin F. Butler, general of the Massachusetts militia (and peacetime lawyer and politician), found a way around Baltimore, commandeering a steamer and using it to carry his troops down Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, Maryland, whence a railroad led to Washington. Maryland secessionists had damaged both engines and tracks, but Butler’s troops, among whom were men who had worked in the shop that made the locomotive, repaired both and got the line running. Other Union troops followed in a steady stream along the same route until, on May 13, Butler and his troops took control of Baltimore.
Semirebellious Maryland continued to be a problem. Near the end of the month, Union troops there arrested a man named John Merryman for recruiting for the Confederacy. Merryman’s lawyer filed for a writ of habeas corpus in federal circuit court. In those days U.S. Supreme Court justices doubled as circuit court judges, and this circuit belonged to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland, who had already shown his proslavery colors in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which he had said that “no black man had any rights that a white man need respect.”3
True to form, Taney on May 27 ordered Merryman released, claiming that only Congress, not the president, could suspend the writ of habeas corpus as Lincoln had recently done in areas crucial to communication between Washington, D.C., and the loyal states. In fact, the Constitution is silent on the issue of who may suspend the writ, noting only that it may indeed be suspended in times of rebellion or invasion. The officer in charge of Merryman refused Taney’s order, and Lincoln backed him up, following the example of Andrew Jackson by defying the chief justice’s decision. Lincoln explained his action to Congress some weeks later. Assuming for the sake of argument that his suspension of the writ had been a technical infraction of the law, Lincoln asked rhetorically, “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Lincoln believed the answer was no, and Congress agreed. It later ratified his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in selected areas as needed throughout the rest of the war. That sometimes included Maryland, where the Lincoln administration took a firm hand in suppressing secessionism by occasionally locking up some of its most vocal adherents for a month or two.
Simultaneous with Maryland’s flirtation with rebellion, the state of Missouri faced a similar crisis. Recently elected Governor Claiborne Jackson was dedicated to the cause of slavery and had led Border Ruffians into Kansas during that territory’s troubles in the 1850s. He directed secessionist state militia in capturing the federal arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, on April 20, the day after the Baltimore riot. With his newly enhanced firepower, Claiborne made plans to take the much larger U.S. arsenal at St. Louis. To improve his chances still further, he requested cannon from Jefferson Davis, who obligingly dispatched several that Louisiana Rebels had plundered from the U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge, shipped in crates labeled “Marble.”
Defending the arsenal was a fiery, diminutive captain of the regular army named Nathaniel Lyon. Alerted to the danger by Unionist Missouri politician Frank Blair, Lyon reconnoitered a camp of some of the secessionist militia outside St. Louis disguised as Blair’s mother-in-law, complete with a dress and a veil to hide his brushy, red beard. Satisfied of the secessionists’ hostile intent, Lyon preempted them, and on May 10 surrounded their camp with Union-loyal, antislavery German American militia regiments from the St. Louis area as well as a few U.S. Army regulars. The secessionists, about seven hundred in number, surrendered without a fight, but as the Union troops marched their prisoners away, a secessionist mob attacked, hurling bricks and firing pistols. In the ensuing riot, four soldiers and about twenty-four civilians were killed. More died in further clashes the following day.
Many Missourians had previously been at best tepid Unionists, and the news that German troops in Federal uniforms had shot down civilians in the streets of St. Louis, even if those civilians had been in the act of rioting, outraged public opinion and brought new recruits to Jackson’s secessionist militia. The state legislature also threw its support to the governor. On June 11 Jackson and the commander of his secessionist militia, General Sterling Price, who had commanded a regiment of Missouri volunteers during the Mexican War, met with Lyon and Blair at the Planters’ House Hotel in St. Louis to discuss restoring peace to the state. By this time, Lincoln had promoted Lyon to brigadier general and given him command of all U.S. troops in Missouri. Jackson and Price demanded that Lyon withdraw all Federal troops from the state, leaving it to the secessionists, who said it would then be neutral. The suggestion outraged Lyon, who said he would see every Missourian dead before he would accept any such agreement. “This means war,” growled the fiery Lyon before stalking out of the room. Jackson and Price returned to Jefferson City, where the governor issued a call for fifty thousand volunteers to oppose Lyon. He did not get nearly that many, and he and the secessionist legislature soon found themselves fleeing toward the southwestern corner of the state as Lyon advanced with his troops from St. Louis.
Kentucky presented a different case entirely. Like Maryland and Missouri, it was a slave state with strong economic ties to the North and a deeply divided population. Also like the other border states, it wished to remain neutral. Unlike them, Kentucky got the chance to do so, at least for a time. Both presidents, Lincoln and Davis, had been born in Kentucky, scarcely one hundred miles apart, but they need not have been Kentucky natives to have understood the political importance of the state. As Lincoln explained the situation that fall, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol”—meaning Washington, D.C.4
Neither side could afford to offend Kentuckians by flouting their state’s announced neutrality. Both scrupulously kept their troops out of Kentucky, though they quietly slipped weapons across the border to equip sympathetic militia within the state and maintained training camps just outside its borders, Union to the north and Confederate to the south, for organizing Kentuckians willing to leave their state and enlist on one side or the other. As some observers pointed out at the time, neutrality amounted to secession. The situation was bizarre and could hardly be expected to last, but for the time being it was a tremendous boon to the Confederacy. At the same time that a inviolably neutral Kentucky provided an impenetrable shield for the heartland of the Confederacy against Union invasion, it also provided a conduit for a very valuable trade with the North, bringing even weapons and ammunition into the industrially weak Confederacy. Still, Lincoln was willing to tolerate it for the time being rather than run the risk of alienating Kentuckians.
Despite the bloodshed in various places and the gathering of newly recruited troops at a number of points on either side of what had become a long, hostile boundary between the Union and the Confederacy, much of America looked for the decisive action to occur in Virginia. Throughout the war, a large segment of the population, the press, and, to a certain extent, both governments showed a fixation with Virginia out of proportion to its importance to the outcome of the conflict. With Maryland secessionists held in check both by the firm hand of the federal government and by its own sizable Unionist population, especially in its western counties, Virginia was the frontline state of the Confederacy. In the older, better-known, and more populous eastern part of the nation, Virginia held the boundary between the Union and the Confederacy. It was the part of the war closest to the major population centers and the major media markets.
The Virginia theater of the war also came to include, by the end of May, the capitals of the two rival governments within a hundred miles of each other. Impressed with both the importance and the prestige of Virginia, the Confederate congress voted on May 20 to accept Virginia’s invitation and move its capital from Montgomery to Richmond. Virginia was the state of Madison, Jefferson, and, most of all, Washington, whom the Confederates assumed would have favored their cause and whose image, mounted on horseback and gesturing, presumably to his troops, they placed on their national seal. Locating the capital in Richmond was a bid to identify with all of Virginia’s past greatness. It was also an assurance to the Virginians that the Confederacy would make every effort to defend their state.
And there were very genuine reasons for the Confederacy to defend Virginia. It was now one of the Confederacy’s most populous states, and it contained the largest share of the South’s industry. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the only mill in the Confederacy that could make a railroad locomotive and one of a very few that could make a heavy cannon. Virginia’s accession greatly strengthened the Confederacy, and the state’s loss would be a severe blow. Moving the national capital to Richmond would both reassure Virginians and place the South’s foremost military hero, President Jefferson Davis, immediately adjacent to the presumed scene of the most important fighting.
Yet not all Virginians were enthusiastic about the new Confederacy. Every southern state contained Unionists, but Virginia held an unusually large number, and they were concentrated in the state’s northwestern counties, not far from Pennsylvania and Ohio. These areas had economic ties to the northern states and, more important, contained few slaves. Slaves made up about one-tenth the percentage of the population (4 percent) in northwestern Virginia that they did in the South as a whole (about 40 percent). Many citizens of the northwestern counties, west of the Allegheny Mountains, felt that their region had always been treated as the redheaded stepchild by the state government in Richmond, paying more than its fair share of taxes and receiving less than its fair share of state spending. When it came to being dragged into a rebellion to make the continent permanently safe for slavery, the northwesterners were ready to draw the line.
With the northwestern counties of Virginia filled with a mostly Union-loyal population ready to throw off the yoke of the tidewater and piedmont slaveholding aristocracy, the region was ripe for the arrival of Federal troops looking to restore loyal government in the region. Washington had no troops to send, but Ohio did. Like several other governors, Ohio’s William Dennison had found himself with more recruits than the state’s quota under Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand men. He wisely enlisted them anyway and so had them on hand to deal with the opportunity developing just beyond his state’s southeastern boundary.
To command them he snagged a highly reputed professional officer. Born in Philadelphia in 1826, George B. McClellan had received special dispensation to enroll in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point prior to his sixteenth birthday. Graduating second in the class of 1846, McClellan had served as an engineer officer in the Mexican War and then in the peacetime army before resigning in 1857 to take up a career as a railroad executive. He had been considered one of the brightest of the rising young officers within the army, and by 1861 he was president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad.
On the issue of slavery, McClellan more or less agreed with the Confederates, but he rejected secession and was disturbed when the Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter. Deciding to reenter the military, McClellan set out for Pennsylvania to offer his services to its governor. Dennison was one of several governors seeking his services and got him to stop by Columbus and give some advice on the organizing of Ohio’s troops. By April 23, he was commanding general of the state’s militia, and on May 3, Lincoln promoted him to major general, making him one of the most senior generals in the army, and assigned him to command the Department of the Ohio, comprising the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
McClellan’s first assignment was to liberate the Unionist citizens of northwestern Virginia and protect the vital Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a strategic link between Washington and the Midwest, as it ran through that region. Leading an army of Ohioans and Indianans, McClellan advanced in early June through Grafton toward a Rebel force at Philippi. The Confederates retreated so rapidly in the face of McClellan’s advance that northern newspapers derisively christened the event “the Philippi Races.”
On July 11 McClellan’s troops met the Confederates in battle at Rich Mountain. In what was meant to be a pincers movement, McClellan sent Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans with a large brigade to strike the Rebels in the rear, on which McClellan would attack with the rest of his force in front. When the moment came, however, McClellan convinced himself that the Confederates badly outnumbered him when, in fact, the reverse was the case. Hesitating, he left Rosecrans to fight the battle alone. Rosecrans won anyway, capturing numerous Confederates and sending the others off in headlong retreat. Union forces followed up, and on July 13 in a small rearguard action at Corrick’s Ford, Confederate Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett fell, the first general on either side to die in the war.
Meanwhile, delegates from the twenty-five northwestern counties of Virginia had met in convention at Wheeling in May. Later that month in the formal secession referendum called by the Virginia secession convention, the northwestern counties voted almost two to one against secession. Early in June a second convention met in Wheeling, denounced secession, and declared the offices of all secessionist state officials to be vacant. In their place, the second Wheeling convention set up a Union-loyal government for the state of Virginia, headed by Francis H. Pierpont as governor. Though the new government claimed rightful sovereignty over all of Virginia, its action, coupled with McClellan’s successful campaign, represented the first steps in the eventual separation of trans-Allegheny Virginia into a new state of West Virginia, a process that would not be formally complete until 1863.
While the North might take satisfaction from its success in trans-Allegheny Virginia, all eyes were turned anxiously on the eastern part of the state, where Washington and Richmond confronted each other across scarcely one hundred miles of piedmont and tidewater Virginia. A first, tentative and halting Union effort in eastern Virginia occurred in early June. When Virginia had seceded, Union forces had retained control of Fort Monroe at the tip of the peninsula formed by the broad estuaries of the York and James rivers where they emptied into Chesapeake Bay. From that base, a small Union column of about 3,500 men under the command of Benjamin Butler advanced northwestward, up the peninsula, in the direction of Richmond. On June 10, the day before the second Wheeling convention gathered four hundred miles to the northwest, Butler’s men encountered the Rebels, dug in behind Brick Kiln Creek near Big Bethel Church about fourteen miles from Fort Monroe and seventy from Richmond. The Federals immediately attacked. The Fifth New York Regiment, colorfully dressed in the uniforms of Algerian Zouaves (colonial units of the French army), complete with baggy red pants, moved toward the Rebel flank. The Seventh New York, filled with the scions of Gotham’s social elite, advanced in the center, then became confused, turned about, and fired into the ranks of the Third New York, coming up in support. Both regiments wore the gray uniforms then common among militia throughout the country. The Seventh, despite its own appearance, had become convinced that the Third was in fact a Confederate regiment that had gotten behind it.
The gaudy and nonstandard uniforms and the rampant confusion set the tone for the day’s action. The Confederates were as inexperienced as the Yankees, but all they had to do was hunker down behind their entrenchments, then known as breastworks, and shoot the Federals as they advanced. It proved all too easy. Only the First Vermont got across Brick Kiln Creek and then only briefly before retreating. One Confederate was killed, and seven were wounded, as against eighteen Union dead, including an officer descended from both Massachusetts’s first governor, John Winthrop, and its greatest divine, Jonathan Edwards. Another sixty Yankees suffered wounds. Butler’s force retreated disconsolately back to Fort Monroe, and the Rebels celebrated what soon came to be dignified with the title of the Battle of Big Bethel, citing it, despite recent setbacks in the western part of Virginia, as further proof, if any was needed, that one Rebel could lick ten Yankees with a cornstalk.
In reality Butler’s forlorn foray had demonstrated two important facts. The first of these was that it would prove difficult and costly in this war to overcome troops defending entrenchments, even when the attacker enjoyed, as Butler did, an almost three-to-one superiority in numbers. The second lesson of Big Bethel was that Benjamin Butler, like most men of his type, was a much better lawyer than general. Good political skills did not necessarily bring with them the ability to lead troops in battle. Leaders of both sides would require much time and repetition before absorbing either lesson.
Butler’s probe up the York–James peninsula had not been anything like a serious Union effort to penetrate to Richmond and put the Confederate government there out of business. For such a grand offensive, northern newspaper editors began to clamor with increasing insistence, led as usual by press doyen Horace Greeley, who placed on the masthead of his influential New York Tribune that summer the slogan “On to Richmond.” The Rebel congress was scheduled to convene in that city in late July, and northern editors demanded that the Union army should get there first. Greeley’s strategically naive slogan operated on the false premise that capturing the enemy’s capital would deliver a swift victory—a popular misconception that helped shape military movements in the East during much of the war.
Commanding the main Union field army in northern Virginia was Brigadier General Irvin McDowell. A big, bluff regular army officer; classmate of Beauregard in West Point back in 1838; and veteran of staff duty in the Mexican War, McDowell had not been Lincoln or Scott’s first choice. That had been Virginian Robert E. Lee, recently promoted to colonel of the army’s Second Cavalry Regiment, both because of Lee’s sterling reputation as an engineer officer in the Mexican War and because of the political benefit to be found in giving the command to a Virginian. Lee had turned them down and gone with his state, so Lincoln and Scott had turned to McDowell, by all accounts a loyal and capable officer, though he had never before commanded troops in battle.
McDowell was painfully aware of his army’s lack of experience and training and badly wanted more time for drill. America’s militia system had lapsed into disarray in the decades before the war, existing in most states only in name and imparting no training at all. The most active part of the prewar militia had been the so-called volunteer companies, local drill teams that doubled as social clubs and turned out on ceremonial occasions in fancy uniforms but had almost as little real military training as their fellow citizens who never even showed up for the perfunctory annual militia muster. The lack of military order in McDowell’s army was visually evident in its polyglot array of uniforms—several species of Zouaves, French chaussers, Prussian jaegers, regular army blue (sometimes worn by the volunteers as well), militia gray, and, in the case of the First Minnesota Regiment, simple red flannel shirts— but the army possessed none of the military skills suggested by any of its garbs, foreign or domestic, except perhaps the Minnesotans, who were, as their uniforms suggested, a collection of lumberjacks and farmers.
Lincoln disagreed with McDowell. Taking the same line as the newspaper editors, he insisted that McDowell launch an early advance against Richmond. This was not merely the product of overheated bravado like Greeley’s but stemmed at least as much from Lincoln’s appreciation of the massive political and economic cost to the country with each week that the war continued. To McDowell’s protest that his men were green, Lincoln allowed that this was true. “But so are the Confederates,” he countered. “You are all green together.” This sort of horse sense would often give Lincoln better insight than his generals during the course of the war. In this case, however, it overlooked the fact that the green Union troops would have to perform the more difficult task of taking the offensive. All the Confederates had to do was get in their way and stay there.
McDowell devised an intelligent plan for defeating the Confederates in front of his army, then encamped near Washington, D.C., and opening the way to Richmond. A smaller Union army of about eighteen thousand men under aged Pennsylvania militia general and War of 1812 veteran Robert Patterson would continue to operate near Harpers Ferry, holding in check a Confederate army of twelve thousand men operating in the lower Shenandoah Valley (because the Shenandoah River flows roughly south to north, the lower Shenandoah Valley always refers to the northeastern end of the valley and the upper valley to its southwestern end). While Patterson kept Johnston’s attention, McDowell himself with thirty-five thousand men would advance from Washington about twenty-five miles due west to Centreville, Virginia. Just beyond Centreville, on the other side of a sluggish stream called Bull Run, waited the twenty-thousand-man Confederate army of Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, hero of Fort Sumter, guarding the important rail nexus called Manassas Junction. McDowell would outnumber him, outflank him, and drive him back in retreat. At least that was the plan.
McDowell’s army marched away from Washington on July 16, and things began going wrong immediately. Staff officers were insufficient in numbers and woefully unprepared by training or experience for moving the largest army yet seen on the North American continent. The troops fell out to pick blackberries, and company officers, who had been elected by these same men and were their neighbors back home, lacked the moral authority to get them back on the march. Commanders of regiments, brigades, and divisions proceeded cautiously, frequently halting to scout ahead lest they lead their columns into an ambush, against which McDowell’s march orders had strictly warned. A march that was supposed to have taken one day—and regulars could have done it in that time—instead took five before all the army’s units were in place near Centreville. The neophyte army’s inexperience was painfully obvious as the Union troops trudged slowly south. Meanwhile, in case Confederates had failed to give timely notice to their commanders of the impending Union attack, one of McDowell’s subordinates on July 18 probed forward contrary to orders toward Blackburn’s Ford on Bull Run and suffered a sharp repulse, alerting the Confederates and giving further proof of the martial superiority of the southern soldier.
In fact, Beauregard was already well aware of McDowell’s approach, having been warned on the Union army’s first taking the road by Confederate female spy and prominent member of Washington society, Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Beauregard, who was in a state of pronounced nervous excitement, not to say panic, notified Davis at once and lamented that his impending defeat was the president’s fault for not reinforcing him sooner. Now, he wrote, it was too late.
But it was not too late for the Confederates. Davis ordered Johnston to slip away from Patterson and hurry to Beauregard’s aid. Since Patterson was doing nothing even remotely interesting to his enemies, Johnston, who was to prove one of the war’s most adept retreaters, had no trouble getting away and leaving the Pennsylvania septuagenarian guarding a valley devoid of almost all Confederate troops. Patterson remained for some time none the wiser. On the way to Manassas Junction, Johnston discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he could move his troops by railroad, thus speeding their approach.
By the morning of July 21, 1861, as McDowell launched his carefully planned attack, Johnston and almost all of his troops had joined Beauregard, and with additional reinforcements Davis had dispatched from other parts of Virginia, the Confederate army behind Bull Run numbered about the same strength as McDowell’s. Johnston, who outranked Beauregard, exercised nominal command but allowed Beauregard the actual direction of the fight.
McDowell’s men set out well before dawn, and by first light a third of them had crossed Bull Run west of Beauregard’s position and were bearing down on his flank while the other two-thirds of McDowell’s army confronted the Confederates in front, across the creek. Beauregard, who had been planning an attack of his own that would have been something of a mirror image of the assault McDowell had launched, abandoned his offensive plans and rushed reinforcements to his crumbling left flank. At first, it seemed no use, as the Federals drove forward relentlessly, rolling up the Confederate line. The key terrain feature turned out to be a hill topped by the farmhouse of eighty-five-year-old widow Judith Henry. Stubbornly refusing to leave her house even as the fighting approached, Mrs. Henry suffered a fatal wound.
Meanwhile, she was not the only one who stubbornly refused to leave Henry House Hill. Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson was there with his brigade of five Virginia regiments drawn up in line awaiting the next Union push. Informed that the Federals were coming, the 1846 West Point graduate, noted Mexican War artillery officer, and recent Virginia Military Institute professor replied, “Then, Sir, we will give them the bayonet.” Amid the wreckage of several brigades fleeing from the Confederate left, Brigadier General Barnard Bee tried to rally his troops. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” he shouted to his men. “Let us determine to die here and we will conquer.” Several other versions of the famous statement exist, and Bee, who was killed moments later, could never clarify his exact words or even his intent, but Jackson, who now had his famous nickname, worked together with additional reinforcements from the Confederate right to hold Henry House Hill. The other Confederate troops rallied around them, and the tactical situation began to stabilize.
Things began to go wrong again for McDowell. He and his inexperienced officers could not orchestrate a mass assault—no easy task on a battlefield with tired and untrained troops—and his attack devolved into a series of regimental charges. The assault stalled. A Confederate regiment attacked one of McDowell’s key artillery batteries, and because the Rebels wore blue uniforms, the Federals mistook them for friendly troops until it was too late to stop them or to save the battery. As the Union troops began to fall back, the already extreme confusion produced by battle, even a hitherto victorious battle, was compounded. The army began to disintegrate.
As organization broke down, panic seized the weary, fought-out soldiers. With no training to steady them, they broke and ran. The Confederates whooped with delight and set off in pursuit, giving a high-pitched cry that would soon be known as the “Rebel Yell.” Caught in the tangle of the hasty retreat were Union civilians, including some members of Congress, who had come out from Washington in buggies with picnic baskets to enjoy the show from a safe distance. They now added their carriages to the confusion on the roads and their panic to the emotional distress of the retreating Union soldiers.
The Confederate pursuit did not last long, as Beauregard and Johnston halted their own exhausted and disorganized troops within sight of the battlefield that their side would soon be calling Manassas and the Federals would call Bull Run. McDowell had unbroken reserves at Centreville and was able to cover an orderly retreat, but for the great mass of his army, the retreat was anything but orderly, as the troops, many of them having thrown away their weapons and ammunition, kept on running or at least walking until they were back in Washington, having covered the return trip in about one-fifth the time they had taken going out.