MONTGOMERY AND RICHMOND
Suspense
APRIL 5
IN MONTGOMERY, CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS AND HIS cabinet grew increasingly uneasy; so too did their commissioners in Washington, their trust sutured in place solely by the assurances of their intermediary, Justice Campbell.
This was hard for the commissioners. They were accustomed to mastery and command and proficient in the art of taking offense; they needed the unalloyed respect of all around them. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed this aspect of the planter class two decades earlier in his Democracy in America and attributed it to slavery. “The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy,” he wrote. “The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”
The Confederate commissioners had come north expecting to be treated as the envoys of a grand new republic, the Confederate States of America, and here was Secretary of State Seward, via Campbell, treating them as if they were house servants demanding a day off. Seward’s continued refusal to meet with them was a blow to their self-esteem, to their honor; in another context it might have required the dispatch of “a friend” to deliver a note of offense, in accord with the Code Duello.
Campbell’s assurances seemed increasingly at odds with what the great waxing tide of rumor was telling the commissioners: that ships were on the way with guns and legions of armed men aboard. During that first week of April their alarm grew daily. “The war wing presses on the President,” they warned in a telegram to Montgomery; “he vibrates to that side.” They reported, too, that Lincoln had met with a number of naval officers. They presumed the subject was Fort Sumter.
Confederate Secretary of War L. P. Walker wrote to General Beauregard to urge him to maintain a state of “watchful vigilance” and warned that he should comport himself “precisely as if you were in the presence of an enemy contemplating to surprise you.”
IN CHARLESTON, FORMER GOVERNOR John Manning, now an aide-de-camp to General Beauregard, nonetheless found time to keep up his flirtation with Mary Chesnut.
Tuesday, April 2: “Breakfasted today with John Manning. Mr C restive because I said I did not tell him every thing. Then John Manning brought me a bunch of violets.”
Wednesday, April 3: “Breakfasted with John Manning who made better jokes than usual.”
Then on Sunday morning, something unexpected: Manning revealed that he had told his own wife about the flirtation. “And now,” Mary wrote, “Mrs. M writes for Mr C’s likeness as she wants to begin a flirtation with him.”
ON THURSDAY, APRIL 4, in Richmond, the still-seated Virginia Convention held a vote on a proposed ordinance of secession. The delegates rejected it 88 to 45.
Edmund Ruffin, in Charleston, was outraged and embarrassed by the vote. He had hoped for better. But the next day the convention again rejected secession by an even wider margin.
“This is worse than I supposed possible even of that submissive and mean body,” Ruffin wrote in his diary on April 5. He added the next day that he hoped—“with all my heart”—that Lincoln would indeed send a powerful naval squadron to attack Charleston. Such an attack, Ruffin believed, would at last force Virginia from its lethargy, with the corollary personal benefit of Ruffin’s being freed from continually having to explain the state’s reluctance.