RUFFIN

A Signal at Christmas

DECEMBER 22–26

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, SOUTH CAROLINA’S SECESSION CONVENTION issued a formal “Declaration” to explain to the larger world why the state had decided to exit the Union, composed by delegate Christopher G. Memminger. Unlike the colonial Declaration of Independence with its stirring and forward-looking deposition that all men were created equal (a concept Edmund Ruffin dismissed as “both false and foolish”), this was a declaration of grievance. It did, however, hark back to that earlier declaration in that it quoted, inexactly, Thomas Jefferson’s famous addition, “that whenever any ‘form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.’”

The United States, the statement argued, had broken its compact with the slaveholding states, mainly in violating the fourth article of the Constitution, which, without directly mentioning slavery, nonetheless made it clear that slaves were property, and that all escaped slaves had to be returned to their rightful owners. The convention’s declaration also cited the 1778 Articles of Confederation, which asserted that each “State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” the base upon which Southern polemicists had built their case for secession—never mind that in asserting such rights the declaration also indirectly provided justification for the personal-liberty laws that Northern states had passed to prevent the seizure of escaped slaves from within their boundaries.

To the dismay of some delegates who believed that the convention’s statement should be couched solely in terms of states’ rights to make it more palatable to the world—namely South Carolina’s potential future trading partners in France and England—delegate Memminger veered straight into the heart of the matter and made slavery the central issue. Touching that especially tender place, Southern honor, he complained that the free states “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.” Moreover, he wrote, the free states had now elected “a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Memminger further alleged—inaccurately—that this benighted government had “announced” that starting March 4, Inauguration Day, “a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”

In concluding the statement, Memminger wrote that South Carolina now declared the federal Union dissolved and in so doing “has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”

Now, on Christmas Eve, the state dispatched three envoys—“commissioners”—to Washington to negotiate “with the Government of the United States for the delivery of the forts, magazines, light-houses, and other real estate” within South Carolina.

MAJOR ANDERSON CHOSE CHRISTMAS Day for his move from Moultrie to Sumter with the idea of capitalizing on the ordinary distractions of the holiday. He kept his plans secret from his officers and superiors in Washington. On December 25, a Tuesday, Captain Foster and his wife planned to hold a Christmas party at their home outside the fort in the adjacent hamlet of Moultrieville, favored by Charlestonians as a summer resort. The couple invited Anderson and the garrison’s other officers, as well as a few locals unafraid to fraternize with Northern men.

One officer, Asst. Surgeon Crawford, noted that Anderson made a special point of urging all his men to attend church on Christmas Day.

That evening Anderson wrote a letter to his wife, Eba, who knew nothing of his plan. He could barely keep himself from revealing it. “I promised to go to Captain Foster’s for a little while tonight,” he told her, “but have really no inclination whatever to do so. I am sorry I have no Christmas gift to offer you. Never mind—the day may very soon come when I shall do something which will gratify you enough to make amends for all the anxiety you now feel on my account.”

THROUGHOUT SOUTH CAROLINA AND the slaveholding South, Christmas was indeed a day of distraction. “At Christmas the china closet gives up its treasures,” wrote Mary Chesnut of how the season unfolded at Mulberry Plantation. “The glass, china, silver, fine linen reserved for grand occasions, comes forth.” A visiting child, Esther Davis, recalled later how enslaved Black waiters in dark-blue broadcloth brought calf’s-head soup, partridge, wild duck, ham, corned beef, and two kinds of turkey—roast and boiled—and deftly positioned it all on a damask tablecloth. “The crowning point of the dinner to us children was when, the table being cleared, simultaneously each person raised a glass and the waiters most dexterously removed the cloth, revealing a second of spotless damask, and dessert was brought in.” Now came plum pudding, mince pie, cranberry pie, custards, syllabub—whipped cream flavored with wine—and plates piled high with fruit, including bananas, an exotic treat. After dessert the waiters removed this cloth as well, exposing the gleaming mahogany table underneath, and then served a closing course of wine and nuts. Even the children got to drink champagne.

On plantations throughout the South, planters briefly eased the strictures that ruled their enslaved populations. They invited field hands into the big house, the one time each year that such a visit was allowed. James Hammond typically held a barbecue for his slaves. At one Christmas he gave a calico frock to every female who had given birth during the preceding year. Formerly enslaved people interviewed decades later by the Federal Writers’ Project recalled being treated by their masters to alcoholic drinks, namely whiskey and eggnog. A custom at many plantations, including Mulberry, called for the white members of the household to provide slaves with a present if they managed to call out “Christmas gift!” before the white member could say “Merry Christmas.” The slaves “would spring out of unexpected corners and from behind doors,” wrote a planter’s wife. In Mississippi, one plantation’s Christmas tradition called for enslaved children to bring a stocking of their choosing to the master’s house, to be filled with treats and gifts. “They all wanted one of Old Miss’es stockings cause now she weighed near on to three hundred pounds.”

A good many planters simply ignored Christmas and worked their enslaved men and women as if it were any other day, but most gave them time off, which provided a respite from the constant supervision of plantation overseers. At Mulberry, enslaved workers got three days of freedom and joined others on shopping trips into Camden, where a few stores stayed open just to cater to the many Black shoppers who during these several days filled the town’s commercial district.

For escape-minded Blacks, the holiday offered an opportunity. The famous slave fugitives William and Ellen Craft fled their plantation right before Christmas and reached Philadelphia on Christmas Day. One former South Carolina slave, John Andrew Jackson, used his time off to get a robust head start in fleeing his plantation. “We all had three days’ holiday at Christmas,” he wrote, “and I, therefore, fixed upon that time as most appropriate for my escape.” He found the customs of Christmas helpful all along the way. The Black operator of a river ferry told him that on Christmas he was able to keep all the money paid for crossings, “and as this was Christmas Day, he was only too glad to get my money and ask no questions.” When challenged by a hotel operator as to where he was going, Jackson replied, “I am going on my Christmas holiday.” He continued on his way.

Christmas was also a time of heightened worry about slave insurrections, a curious thing given the repeated avowals of planters and proslavery writers that they had nothing to fear from their enslaved workers. With slaves given time off and drinking alcohol and being allowed to visit peers on other plantations, rumors of potential uprisings inevitably began to circulate over the holiday. In 1856 in Kentucky and Tennessee word spread that Black ironworkers planned a Christmas insurrection. Frederick Law Olmsted, in his travels through the South, heard about an Alabama planter who so worried about what his slaves would do over Christmas that he built a secret redoubt in the woods to which his family retreated for the holiday. On December 22, 1860, Keziah Brevard, one of the South’s few female planters, expressed her own uneasiness. “Can we doubt God’s protection—there have been several houses this week without a white gentleman at home and yet we are safe—has not our God been with us?”

During this particular Christmas, North Carolina unionist James C. Johnston took the opportunity to berate South Carolina for secession. In a letter to his friend James Petigru, the Charleston unionist, he wrote, “Xmas was no doubt a very merry one with you in Charleston where every body is drunk or crazy and I hope the new year may be a happy one and that all of you may come to your senses before the end of it.” He likened South Carolina to “an old woman who has been engaged in scolding all her life until at last she works herself up into a fit of hysterics and thus has all kinds of fantasies and imaginations … and like a wild cat is ready to fly at any person who looks at her.”

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, EDMUND RUFFIN at last departed Charleston for Florida, where the state’s secession convention was scheduled to begin on Thursday, January 3. He was encouraged by yet another nod to his rising fame—the gift of a free steamer passage to Fernandina, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, offered to him personally by the steamship line’s president.

Ruffin boarded and braced himself for seasickness, to which he was prone. He took off only his coat and boots, then settled into his berth. At ten-thirty that night he heard a sudden rush of steam and learned that an engine malfunction had knocked out one of the ship’s two paddle wheels. The vessel returned to Charleston, where it arrived at four A.M. on Christmas Day. Repairs and other delays stranded Ruffin in the city for the rest of the day and most of the next, during which he received a letter from his son Julian with the news, “not unexpected,” that the infant son of his newly deceased daughter Elizabeth had likewise died. He made no further reference in his diary to either his grandson or his daughter. At six P.M. he again boarded ship and at 7:10 was underway.

“After we had passed Fort Moultrie about 4 miles,” he wrote in his diary that night, December 26, “I was on the upper deck looking out on the water, when I heard two loud discharges of cannon from that fort, in quick succession. It was an unusual occurrence, as everything there latterly has been conducted so as to be as quiet as possible. There has not even been the firing of a gun at sunset as is the general practice of all fortresses.”

He suspected it might be a signal of some sort, though its meaning escaped him.