Chapter 40
Secession!

Christmas of 1860 was certainly not a very festive day.

Almeda and Aunt Katie tried to make it as happy as they could. There were presents and we had a nice dinner with the Rutledges at our house. But Pa felt so downcast over Zack, and everyone shared his misery.

Pa now had two things to feel guilt-ridden about—driving Zack away in the first place, and then turning back when we were there instead of going on to find him—Indian danger or not!

“If only I hadn’t been such a coward,” Pa said a dozen times. “I might have got to him and talked him into coming back home with me. But that handful of Indians made me hightail it outta there like a scared jackrabbit!”

“There were more than a few, Pa,” I reminded him. “We both almost got ourselves good and dead.”

But nothing I or anyone else said could perk up Pa’s spirits. And who was I to blame him? I’d have felt terrible, too. I did feel terrible, but not so bad as if I’d been his father. Maybe Zack was being rebellious and independent by running off as he had. But Pa didn’t have the luxury of the man in the New Testament, knowing he had been a good father and yet not being able to do anything about his son’s foolish youthfulness. Maybe Pa had been a decent father to Zack; maybe he hadn’t. He sure had been to me. But the fact was, he didn’t think so, and he believed the accusations Zack had shouted at him the day he’d left.

So it was a lot harder on him than the father in the Bible who just had to wait patiently for his prodigal son to come to his senses. Pa had to carry guilt along with everything else, guilt for having caused all the trouble and heartbreak himself. Now thinking that Zack was probably dead, but not knowing, and knowing he might never know for sure—it was just an unbearable load for poor Pa. All the rest of us could do was love him and pray for him. But we couldn’t make it go away.

As always, news from the East got into our papers about two weeks after it actually happened. During that first week of the new year of 1861, we began to learn of events that did not portend good news for the future. President Buchanan still hadn’t done anything to block or counter South Carolina’s action. Neither had he nor anyone else made any hard attempts to resolve the crisis with a compromise of some kind. These failures led to the most serious news of all: one by one, starting with Mississippi on December 20, the rest of the southern states began to secede from the Union too. Next came Florida, then Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and finally later in January, Texas.

Still President Buchanan did nothing. Abraham Lincoln remained powerless until he would take office on March 3. Was nothing to be done to save the United States of America from becoming the Disunited States?

As they seceded, the southern states had taken possession of federal properties inside their borders. South Carolina could not immediately seize Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, however, because it had no navy and because the fort was held by seventy-five Union soldiers.

But South Carolina wanted the fort. Now that the new independent little country was over a month old, it was beginning to feel itself strong and important. So a committee was sent to Washington to negotiate with the United States on behalf of the nation of South Carolina to have the fort transferred to the former state.

President Buchanan refused to give up the fort. Finally he got angry and sent an unarmed steamer down the coast to Fort Sumter with more troops and supplies. South Carolina military troops fired on the ship and forced it to turn around.

It had been the first act of war. Yet even though northerners and we in the West were shocked and astonished at what the South was doing, there was still no real sense of the danger and peril yet to come.

Even if President Buchanan had wanted to force South Carolina and the other states back into the Union, there would probably have been little he could have done. The regular army of the nation was only 15,000 strong, and most of those men were out West protecting settlers and wagon trains and Pony Express riders from Indians. It would have taken months to get the army back to the East—and doing so would have left the West to the Indians!

Everyone loathed what the South was doing, and said it was illegal and against the Constitution to do it. Yet no one actually wanted to fight to stop them from doing it.

But tempers and emotions were gradually running hotter and more violent and unpredictable.

Meanwhile, the southern states were wasting no time. As northern politicians scurried around trying to set up meetings and find compromise plans, the seven states that had seceded were busy forming a new government. From the beginning, they had planned to organize a whole new nation as soon as secession had been accomplished—a new nation based on the principle of states’ rights. And it was important that they do so immediately . . . before Lincoln’s inauguration!

Therefore, delegates from the seven states met in February in Montgomery, Alabama, and founded a new nation. They called it the Confederate States of America. And they didn’t waste time with an election—the delegates themselves chose Mississippi Senator and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis as their new president.