WASHINGTON

To Sell or Collide

FEBRUARY 6

BY THE FIRST WEEK OF FEBRUARY, SOUTH CAROLINA’S PREPARATIONS for attacking Sumter appeared to be nearing completion. At Cummings Point on Morris Island, site of the nearest battery, workers were installing iron shutters on the bombproof redoubts that housed the guns, the final phase of construction. “They are, I suspect, pretty nearly ready over there,” Major Anderson reported to Adjutant Cooper on Wednesday, February 6. “God grant that these people may not make the attack for which they have so long threatened.”

That same day the Hall-Hayne mission to Washington ran aground on a reef of mutual naïveté. Whatever Quartermaster Hall’s contribution was to this is lost to history, but South Carolina Attorney General Hayne and U.S. War Secretary Holt both seemed to have little grasp of how important Fort Sumter was to the other.

Hayne marched into the White House with the idea that he could simply demand the surrender of the fort, negotiate some kind of payment, and then go home. “I do not come as a military man to demand the surrender of a fortress,” he told Buchanan and Holt, “but as the legal officer of the State—its attorney general—to claim for the State the exercise of its undoubted right of eminent domain, and to pledge the State to make good all injury to the rights of property which arise from the exercise of the claim.” He proposed to acquire the fort through a simple legal maneuver used routinely in domestic civic life and then to pay for it “to the full extent of the money value of the property,” as if it were simply a house in the path of a planned railroad.

Holt found this extraordinary. He rejected without qualification Hayne’s assertion of eminent domain and added that the president had no constitutional power to sell any public property. Only Congress could do so. “The President, as the head of the executive branch of Government only, can no more sell and transfer Fort Sumter to South Carolina than he can sell and convey the Capitol of the United States to Maryland.”

But now Holt revealed his own naïveté about the crisis and in particular about the power of honor in shaping Southern attitudes. The fort, he told Hayne, continued to serve merely the purposes for which it was built, the defense of America, generally, and Charleston in particular. “How the presence of a small garrison, actuated by such a spirit as this, can compromise the dignity or honor of South Carolina, or become a source of irritation to her people, the President is at a loss to understand,” Holt wrote. “The attitude of that garrison, as has often been declared, is neither menacing, nor defiant, nor unfriendly. It is acting under orders to stand strictly on the defensive, and the government and people of South Carolina must well know that they can never receive aught but shelter from its guns, unless, in the absence of all provocation, they should assault it, and seek its destruction.”

Holt’s letter offended Hayne. He felt chastised and diminished, his honor bruised, enough so as to raise fears among his Southern compatriots that he might try to persuade South Carolina authorities, always testy, to launch an immediate assault on Sumter. Rumor of this reached the delegates at the Washington Peace Convention, who feared that an attack now would disrupt and perhaps even abort their efforts. Former U.S. president John Tyler, presiding over the conference, wired Governor Pickens in South Carolina. “Can my voice reach you?” he wrote on Thursday, February 7. “If so, do not attack Fort Sumter.”

GOVERNOR PICKENS, HOWEVER, WAS in a warlike mood. In a letter to a friend in Baltimore, he declared the sudden increase in federal troops in Washington to be a circumstance of “deepest degradation” to Maryland and Virginia. “If you can bear this, then you can bear anything,” Pickens lectured his friend. To end federal rule, he wrote, the two states need only seize control of two powerful forts, McHenry in Baltimore and Monroe in Norfolk.

Pickens blithely proposed a path to do so. The two states should immediately seize Washington, D.C., and in the ensuing “convulsion” simply take the two forts. One immediate benefit, Pickens argued, would be that Lincoln would have to find another location for his March 4 inauguration, thereby causing tumult in the North. “It would all be over in three weeks, and as far as the Southern States are concerned there would be peace, and the North would be divided and in confusion. It looks violent at first but I sincerely believe it would be the most certain mode of saving the country from a permanent and bloody civil war.”

Even former senator James Hammond of Redcliffe Plantation was ready for action, as he told a friend, A. B. Allen, in a letter that same Thursday. The fact that Allen was still an ally was something of a miracle. The former editor and cofounder of the American Agriculturist lived in New York and opposed slavery and had told Hammond as much. That Hammond’s reply did not ignite the stationery upon which it was written is also a miracle.

“I have traveled over all the grounds so often that I am sick of the subject and feel now as we all do more disposed to fight it out than argue any more,” Hammond wrote. It was views like Allen’s, he charged, that lay at the root of the conflict. “You think our system an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last,” Hammond wrote. “We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects.

“Can you not let us alone?”

AT FORT SUMTER, ANDERSON received a very welcome letter from his wife, Eba, after her safe return to New York, in which she recounted a visit paid to her at Brevoort House by a planter and botanist from South Carolina named Henry Ravenel, author of the not very famous but minutely authoritative five-volume Fungi Caroliniani Exsiccati.

The conversation inevitably turned to secession and Fort Sumter, she wrote. She told Ravenel of her concerns but also expressed her rising fury, and shame. She vowed that she would “never be found in the same Confederacy with South Carolina … that really, for the first time in my life, I was ashamed of being a Southerner, since the whole North was crying out at the little pitiful, contemptible course his State was pursuing towards the fort in her harbor. Indeed, I said a great many very unpleasant truths, in the most pleasant manner possible.”

She did hope for an amicable resolution to the crisis, she told her husband, but she added that if he and his garrison were made to abandon the fort and cede it to South Carolina, “I, for one, will not be satisfied.”

“Do ask those in authority at Washington,” she wrote. “I would make it a special request—to let you blow it up, sky high, on leaving it.”