The concerns of the spring of 1861 disrupted the rhythms of everyday life across the Northern states. As tensions increased before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Northerners became consumers of any and all news relating to the situation in Charleston harbor. As they had during the secession crisis, people assembled near telegraph and newspaper offices hoping to pick up the national news or just milled around the streets expecting to hear something of importance. Wilbur Fiske, a young Vermonter, and his friends were awaiting news at the post office in their small town where they heard of the violent events in Charleston from an emotional elderly postmaster.1 In New Haven, crowds filled the streets to buy freshly printed newspapers, while out-of-town couriers rushed back to their smaller Connecticut communities burdened with copies of the big city’s paper.2 On the agricultural frontier, the news of Fort Sumter’s fall came in the old-fashioned manner familiar to patriots of a much earlier time. In one rural Michigan region, farmers were at work in the fields, sharing the community’s one threshing machine, when a man on horseback reared up to announce Lincoln’s call for troops in reaction to the disaster.3
If someone had by some strange chance missed the reports concerning events in Charleston harbor, he or she would probably have heard about Fort Sumter’s fate at a Sunday service. Across Connecticut, ministers preached war and, at a more practical level, New Britain preachers announced a war meeting scheduled for that evening.4 In neighboring Massachusetts, Boston churches “thundered with denunciations of the rebellion.”5 Mary Livermore recalled the messages from that city’s pulpits being “such as were never heard before . . . not even from radical preachers.”6
One would expect such sermons in New England, but even conservative preachers now changed their minds when confronted with this explicit example of Southern treachery.7 Sometimes, ministers realized they had to catch up with the patriotic sentiment of congregations that would not stand for anything but support for putting down the rebellion. Before the town of Courtland, New York, held a community meeting on April 20, one local preacher had spoken out against using violence against the wayward Southern states; after the rousing gathering, things changed and Courtland ministers preached against treason.8 Indeed, for the most part, mainstream Northern Protestant clergymen spoke as one on the issue of Union, sometimes judging the new enemy with little regard for Christian charity. A few days after Sumter, in the state senate chamber at Madison, Wisconsin, the Methodist chaplain prayed “these men who have thus turned traitors against their country ought to be hung in this world and damned in the world to come.”9 Across the North, such ministers added a political dimension to their preaching and a moral dimension to the national crusade about which they would continue to remind their congregations throughout the war.10 Also, as the sectional crisis progressed, Northerners, whether they believed in an antislavery crusade or a war for the Union, could add to their motives for resisting secession their Christian duty to wage battle against a people who were doing the work of Satan, the original secessionist.11
When they absorbed the news, Northerners reacted to the events with shock, worry, anger, and resolve. As Mary Livermore recalled, the telegraphic transmission concerning “the lowering of the stars and stripes, and the surrender of the beleaguered garrison” brought “news [that] fell on the land like a thunderbolt.”12 Some sober heads understood what was awaiting their men. The uncle of Elbridge Copp, a New Hampshire boy eager to go off and fight the rebels, believed that it would be “a terrible war.”13 Such concerns, if not common or loudly expressed, certainly reached across the nation. Theodore Upson and his father, Jonathan, who had family in the South, were husking corn on their Indiana farm when a friend informed them of the firing on Fort Sumter. The elder Upson “got white and couldn’t say a word.” He stopped work for the day, returned to the family house, and after discussing the event with his wife, according to the son, “looked ten years older.” Theodore’s grandmother added to the emotional scene as she cried over the fate of her Southern relations. “Now they will suffer!” the younger Upson recalled her saying, “God knows how they will suffer! . . . Oh to think that I should have lived to see the day when Brother should rise against Brother.”14 Such considerations, however, generally gave way to excitement fueled by patriotism and a belief that the loyal states would quickly deal with the traitors.
Northerners might have wondered why they had taken their country for granted in the years preceding a crisis that challenged its very existence. Mary Livermore recalled, “Never before had the national flag signified anything to me.” Now, as she witnessed it flying all across Boston, “all that it symbolized as representative government and emblematic of national majesty became clear to my mental vision.”15 New Yorker Jane Stuart Woolsey would have understood such emotion. “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now,” she admitted some weeks after Sumter fell. “How could we ever have laughed at Fourth-of-Julys?”16 Even William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator and the abolitionist who had condemned the Constitution as a bulwark for slavery, now found beauty in a flag that slaveholders scorned.17
Northerners now gathered in town halls and town squares, at schoolhouses and opera houses to hear patriotic speeches, condemnations of southern traitors, and plans of action. “All normal habits of life were suspended,” Mary Livermore noted, “and business and pleasure were alike forgotten.”18 In the town of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, people stopped working, congregated on the streets, and attended courthouse meetings.19
So it was, with the excitement drawing people away from their usual routines across the land. Vermonter Ann Stevens wrote to her brother on April 21 that “There is scarcely anything else thought or talked about here, men gather in the streets and a crowd is ever in the bar room talking hotly concerning the state of affairs.”20 Bells rang out in Concord, Massachusetts, calling people to the commons to listen to a reading of the president’s proclamation.21 In Belleville, Illinois, in the southwestern part of the state, old and new Americans listened to speeches in English and German before vowing to preserve the Constitution and enforce the laws of the land.22 Later in June in Greenville, Wisconsin, residents gathered for a flag raising at which the local Catholic priest played a prominent role; they also heard speeches in German and Gaelic.23
Distracted by the momentous events of the day, University of Vermont students found it “hard . . . to study or do anything but get excited.”24 So it would be at other institutions where young men were ready to commit themselves to the preservation of the Union. John Langdon Sibley, Harvard University’s librarian, noted how his institution was disrupted by the emotional reaction to the fall of Fort Sumter. The students, similar to their Vermont counterparts, could not tend to their books, and many of them dropped everything to answer Lincoln’s call for volunteers. Governor John Andrew also helped to deplete enrollment when he commanded those Massachusetts militia members in the student body to report to their companies.25
People expressed their patriotic sentiments by adorning themselves, their tables, and their animals with the national colors.26 Liberty poles sprung up in many towns, and national flags became part of the landscape, flying from public and private buildings across the North, along city streets and rural byways, and even from the church steeples, just one more example of much of the Northern clergy’s unapologetic commitment to the Union.27 All across New Jersey flags appeared, and while the people of New York City, a place that had important commercial connections with the South, lagged a little behind their neighbors across the Hudson River, they soon followed suit.28 New Yorker Jane Stuart Woolsey probably contributed to the increasing public pressure on business to show their support for the Union with flag flying. On April 18, she “amused herself in shopping . . . by saying to everyone: ‘You have no flag out yet! Are you getting one ready?’”29
Newspapers across the North helped sustain this patriotism, giving readers a sense of purpose as they urged readers to rise to the challenges thrown before them by the secessionists. Not only would the fight against the secessionists lead to an end to the attempt to destroy republican government, it would revive the spirit of the North, stop disruptive party squabbling, purge Washington of corruption, and restore a sense of honor that had been lost in the scramble for material gain. The country, so wrote an editorialist in the New York Herald in late April, “will come out of the fire like gold purified of its dross.”30 Fighting secession would revive public virtue from the businessman to the lowliest of urban dwellers. Battling to keep the nation whole would even absolve the North of its sinful cooperation with Southerners in the past to maintain the institution of slavery. “Blood it is then,” the Madison Wisconsin Daily Patriot, a Democratic Party paper, proclaimed on April 30, “and let it flow till the past is atoned, and a long future secured to peace, prosperity, happiness, and honor.”31
Northerners repeated in their letters these themes as well as those that Lincoln had struck in his March 1861 inaugural address when he argued for the perpetuity of the Union and the validity of constitutional processes.32 Joseph L. Perkins, a medical student at the University of Vermont, understood that secession challenged national liberty. Perkins acknowledged that the nation had a constitution and a duly elected president. “Shall we support him in doing his duty—in executing the laws or desert him?” he asked his brother. “We the light of the world toward which all nations are gazing,” he continued, “shall we allow it to be extinguished becaus[e] demons prefer darkness?” For Perkins, the answer was not debatable; they must do everything within their power to save the country. “My life is at my country’s disposal and if possible should be given ten thousand times ere I’d be ruled by tyrants and much less traitors.” After all, he told his brother, “What would be the pleasure of homes without Liberty?”33
The cause for the Union was, consequently, not just a constitutional necessity and a patriotic duty; as many Northern ministers made clear, it was a sacred obligation that the loyal citizens must fulfill. William Parmenter, an Oberlin College student, explained to his mother why he volunteered to fight the rebels in these terms, also indicating that despite the Republican Party’s professed limited political and constitutional aims, there were some Northerners who from the start were willing to fight a war to end slavery. “This is not a mere sentiment of patriotism, either,” he wrote. “Christian people throughout the North have been praying for this time, and God has answered their prayers. The conflict is now between Liberty and Slavery, Christianity and Barbarism, God and the Prince of Darkness. There never was a time when Christians were so united in one common cause, and there never was a cause which received so many prayers from praying people. No man is worthy of the name Christian, who shrinks from any duty which the Lord places before him.”34 No wonder William T. Shepherd believed that Christians should feel comfortable becoming soldiers in such a cause; they would be joining the army with “the approbation of a Heavenly Father.”35
After the firing on Fort Sumter, patriotism united people who had been divided only a day earlier. Now most Northerners hoped that their section could move beyond old-fashioned political partisanship. There was good reason for them to assume that a united people would stand up to the secessionists in the aftermath of Fort Sumter. Public displays of patriotism and unity spontaneously appeared throughout the Northern states. Ulysses S. Grant noted of his town of Galena, Illinois, “for a time there were no party distinctions; all were Union men, determined to avenge the insult to the national flag.”36 Back East the reaction was comparable. Horace Binney, a Philadelphia lawyer, explained that the news of Fort Sumter “started us all to our feet, as one man; all political division ceased among us from that very moment. . . . There is among us but one thought, one object, one end, one symbol,—the Stars and Stripes.”37
It was one thing to leave the Union, and something quite different to fire on the national flag. The compromisers might once have discounted talk of a slave power conspiracy designed to undermine the liberties of white Northerners, but they now gave it credence. The mendacious slaveholding oligarchy had long contemplated secession, they concluded as they came to understand present events in light of the past sectional controversies.38 The editor of the Pittsburgh Post, a paper that had supported Democrat Stephen Douglas during the 1860 election, made it clear to his readers that now was the time to maintain “the integrity of a great government.” “Political partizanship [sic] must now cease to govern men on this issue,” he declared. Hearing out the complaints of America’s slaveholders was proper “ in the Union.” But once the South “becomes an enemy of the American system of governance . . . and fires upon the flag, which she, as well as we, are bound to protect, our influence goes for that flag, no matter whether a Republican or a Democrat holds it, and we will sustain any administration, no matter how distasteful its policy may be to us personally.”39
Just below this noisy consensus, however, was a strain of dissent that would become more apparent as war talk turned into war making. In New Jersey, for example, Democrats gave notice that party differences had not disappeared; they supported war measures but fought with Republicans over how far the state should go in appropriating the funds needed to conduct the war. Suspicious of the Republicans and of the Lincoln administration, they were not yet ready to abdicate all rights to dissent. Yet in the end, most of them voted for Governor Charles S. Olden’s request for two million dollars to deal with the emergency.40 For the time being, there was no party when it came to supporting the larger effort to put down the rebellion.
During the spring of 1861, despite some indications to the contrary, there appeared to be more harmony than discord. The war’s direction would soon give the parties ample reason to conduct their partisan business. In the meantime, enthusiasm for the cause of the Union could not help but lead to attempts to silence the remaining bold dissenters or to generate some violence against individuals who had previously expressed sympathetic views of the secessionists. In Philadelphia, immediately after the fall of Sumter, rowdy patriots attacked “well-known persons, who had openly expressed secession opinions” and threatened others of like mind. The mayor and police rescued from a mob a newspaper where “the editor had been foolish enough to hang out a [South Carolina] Palmetto flag.” The crowd “then visited all the newspaper offices & insisted on their showing the American flag.” Sidney Fisher reported that it was essential for Philadelphians who had expressed sympathy for secession now to drape their houses with national flags to convince the mob of their loyalty.41
Philadelphia was not the only place where patriots intimidated those individuals who disagreed with them. Near Centreville, Indiana, a committee called on one of their neighbors who had expressed his sympathy for South Carolina secessionists “to make an inquest as to his devotion to the Union”; so confronted, he professed his loyalty.42 At a meeting in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Democratic newspaper editor Jeremiah Crowley voiced a positive opinion about Jefferson Davis; the crowd shouted him down and within the day he was editorializing about the need to preserve the Union regardless of the cost.43 A “vigilance committee” in Waupun, Wisconsin, issued a “Warning to Traitors” on April 21, threatening individuals who were dissuading men from volunteering; the committee warned that “the public expression of traitorous sentiments” could no longer be tolerated.44
On the East Coast, Democratic editors in New Jersey gave in to popular pressure, even if some did so begrudgingly, and expressed their support for the war.45 Some of them, concerned about free speech, shared the sentiments of their colleagues in Rockland, Maine. Before the end of April, the editor of the Rockland Democrat and Free Press, probably reacting to overly enthusiastic patriotic expressions in the community, was protesting that his community must respect free speech even as he vowed his support for the Union. Less than a month later, he accused Maine Republicans of trying to “put down freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and free opinion. . . . The papers have advised it; individuals have advised it, and mobs have threatened personal violence and destruction of property.”46 The issue of constitutional rights would be one that antiadministration Northerners would test as the conflict dragged on beyond the quick conclusion that Americans expected in the spring of 1861. In the wake of Fort Sumter, patriotic pronouncement notwithstanding, Sidney Fisher believed that Philadelphia Democrats still hated Lincoln and “will take advantage of any turn in affairs to create trouble.”47
Fisher remained suspicious because, despite the optimism of many Northerners, there was no promise that political unity would remain the norm after the country went to war. In fact, for some, during the spring of 1861, uncertainty about the future prompted concerns that things would get worse before they turned for the better. Charles Peddle and probably many other Northerners worried how far the secession movement would go before it would end. He feared disloyalty in Missouri and Kentucky, believing that it was a foregone conclusion that Kentucky would secede. So, too, would Missouri, he assumed, an event that would bring about a civil war in St. Louis. Equally unsettling for many Northerners was the April 19 mobbing of U.S. soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts by Southern sympathizers in Baltimore, something Peddle judged to be “a most dastardly thing.” But fear, anger, and excitement produced action in Peddle’s community. By April 21, Terre Haute had already “sent two companies, about 200 hundred men from this place” to stop the secessionists and raised home guard units to protect the region from those potential Confederates mustering along the state’s borders.48 The Lincoln administration would deal with the border state crisis, securing Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland for the Union, although those states would experience different degrees of bloodshed and fratricide before the war ended.
The events of the spring of 1861 stirred new martial feelings in the breasts of people across the North that would lead men to turn away from the quiet of civilian life and accept the challenge of putting down the rebellion. As Augustus Ayling observed of his Lowell, Massachusetts, neighbors, “Everybody was ugly and ready to fight the rebels if only given a chance.”49 The firing on Fort Sumter had been an insult to the nation, the Constitution, and the flag, an insult that now required an answer. Secession continued to mean chaos and anarchy, a destruction of the best government known to man. Consequently, the government relying on its patriotic citizens “must and will maintain its authority, even if it is necessary to make the rebel States a solitude.”50 Other editorialists fanned the fire of patriotism in their communities with similar warnings and stirring words that promised the Northern states would use all of their resources to vindicate national honor.51 A Cleveland, Ohio, editorialist made clear the insult was grave and demanded a response. “Men of Ohio!” he proclaimed, “the Flag of our Country . . . has been torn down from its standard, and left to trail in the dust beneath the banner of rebellious host!” He then asked: “Shall it remain there? . . . Ohio must be in the van of the battle.”52 “Patriotic citizen!” demanded a Boston writer, “choose which side you will serve, the world’s best hope, our noble Republican Government, or the bottomless pit, social anarchy.”53 Underlying the insult in the attack on Fort Sumter, the Democratic editorialist of the Pittsburgh Post continued, “The American flag—the flag of our Union—and the honored banner of a government which is bound to protect the interests of the whole country . . . has been fired into by American citizens, disloyal to the government of the country.” Again, such an insult required a response. “No American of true heart and brave soul will stand this,” he confirmed, “No American ought to stand it.” Despite any sympathy a Northern Democrat might have had for Southern complaints, there was now no choice, he continued, because the insult to the flag had international ramifications as well as domestic ones: “we will sustain any administration, no matter how distasteful its policy may be to us personally, in proving to the world that the American eagle,—the proud bird of our banner—fears not to brave the wrath of foreign foes, or the mad rebellion of its own fostered children.”54
Future soldiers understood that they would need to put aside the pleasures of home to address the crisis, and they immediately began to offer their services to their country. Maine resident Abner Small recalled that the shells fired on Fort Sumter “exploded under me” and propelled him into the army. He and his comrades unhesitatingly signed their enlistment papers. “Our minds were made up,” he wrote, “we needed no persuading.” They dropped everything to answer the call to duty. “George Benson left his anvil,” Small noted, “Jim Ricker his plow, Frank Pullen his school books, Will Wyman his paint pot hanging to the ladder.”55 Those frontier Michigan farmers who learned of Fort Sumter from the horseback rider jumped from the threshing machine and rushed off to enlist even before the messenger had finished his announcement. Anna Howard Shaw, a young girl on the verge of womanhood at the time, recalled, “In ten minutes not a man was left in the field.”56
Across the North, men and boys could recount similar stories about how the immediacy of the situation drew them from their old routines. One Vermonter “hurd [sic] of the surrender of Fort Sumpter [sic], dropped his work and the next day shouldered his knapsack and started for Charlestown,” while a group of Middlebury College students left their schoolbooks to join the army.57 On April 21, William T. Shepherd described to his mother the emotions the crisis stirred in him that he had never before experienced. “Often when thinking of the great question of the day my heart jumps—sending a chill through my veins, inspiring my soul with courage to do anything in the cause of my country & liberty,” he told her; “It seems as though I must do something to rescue my Native land from destruction and ruin.”58 The army would be “a Hard life,” Shepherd expected, “but anything for my Native Land.”59
African American Northerners were just as eager as their white neighbors to enter the fray. They met in their communities to proclaim their devotion to the nation and formed voluntary military companies or offered extant organizations to fight for the Union and more.60 Cleveland, Ohio, African Americans made it known that they were “ready to go forth and do battle in the common cause of the country.” The Hannibal Guards of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, did not hesitate to volunteer for duty in the state’s militia. “[A]lthough deprived of our political rights,” they petitioned, “we yet wish the government of the United States to be sustained against the tyranny of slavery.”61
Black Northerners from across the region joined these Cleveland and Pittsburgh residents in expressing their desire to go to war to save the Union. However, the record of antebellum black abolitionism suggested that they understood very well the kind of Union they expected to save, even if they diplomatically avoided mentioning emancipation. From the outset of the war, the orator, editor, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass made it clear that he believed the conflict was about slavery, that the rebels “mean the perpetuity, and supremacy of slavery” to the point where, if successful, they would “place their iron yoke upon the necks of freemen.”62 Douglass also immediately understood the practical strength that the slaveholding rebels drew from their chattels, and he advocated emancipation as a tool of war from the outset of the fighting. If the government were to “cut off the connection between the fighting master and the working slave,” it would “at once put an end to this rebellion.”63
Black Northerners shared Douglass’s view of the war as an antislavery war and believed that they could make a significant contribution to its successful conclusion if only the nation allowed them to fight. On April 27, George Lawrence, Jr., writing in New York City’s Weekly Anglo-African, suggested that a band of 500 black guerrillas ranging through the Appalachians and along the coast could do more to destroy slavery than white troops ten times their number fighting traditional battles. “We want Nat Turner—not speeches,” he wrote, “Denmark Vesey—not resolutions; John Brown—not meetings.”64 Even in the wake of the disastrous battle at Bull Run in Virginia in July 1861, black abolitionist James McCune Smith prescribed immediate emancipation as “The only salvation of this nation.”65
At the outset of the war, most black Northerners tactfully avoided such incendiary language, but theirs would indeed be an antislavery war, especially if the nation allowed them to fight. In 1861, however, when white men took up arms, they did so expecting to fight a short, white man’s war, with the sole purpose of restoring the nation’s antebellum constitutional status quo. In Ohio, African Americans, who understood the political limitations placed on them by the state, came forward only to find white authorities opposed to their enlistment. Over a hundred black Wilberforce University students organized a company, but the governor turned them away.66 Cities across the North had black militia groups ready to fight, but Lincoln’s government was not yet ready to embrace their sacrifice, and local authorities had little desire to accept their black citizens as volunteers.67 Even African American refugees living safe in Canada were willing to return to bear arms in the cause, but failed to secure places in the white volunteer army.68 As a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer declared, blacks were to mind their own business because “this is a white man’s war.”69 Confronted with that reality, most Northern blacks tempered their support for the conflict until emancipation became a declared goal.70 In 1861, however, at least some of the spurned black men of Ohio pledged to remain committed to the Union cause.71