CHARLESTON AND MONTGOMERY

Suspicion

APRIL 9

AT DAYBREAK ON TUESDAY, APRIL 9, EDMUND RUFFIN CHECKED OUT of his hotel and walked to the Charleston wharf carrying a small carpet bag and a training musket that he had borrowed from the Citadel Military Academy. He boarded a steamer bound for Morris Island, where he planned to join in the island’s defense. He knew he would be recognized immediately: The old secessionist, armed and somewhat dangerous, had arrived.

What he wanted was attention, and he got it. “My going on this occasion was made so much of, and I was accosted by so many individuals, mostly unknown to me, with words of high praise and compliment, that I felt ashamed of such exaggerated commendation for my very small effort or sacrifice.” In fact, for Ruffin this was a tonic. He was doubly heartened when he arrived at Morris Island. The captain of a rifle company cried out, “Three cheers for Mr. Ruffin.” A swarm of volunteer soldiers, all members of the Charleston aristocracy, gathered around him hurrahing wildly, “which I acknowledged,” he wrote, “by taking off my hat, and bowing in silence.”

But his arrival was also greeted with a degree of private mirth. “Mr. Ruffin insisted that he should be an active member and take his share in every duty,” wrote one private, William Gourdin Young, thirty, a member of a prominent Charleston family. “It was arranged that he should do just enough to satisfy him that he was not neglected. The old man managed to keep up with the boys, had a good time, fared sumptuously every day, and set an example of moderation in partaking of the good things furnished by our families and friends, an example not always followed, but we were not a very bad lot.”

Several officers invited Ruffin to join their artillery militias, but he did not want to be stationed at some remote battery where his musket would be useless, and where, he wrote, “I could see no more of the engagement outside, than if I was in a cellar in Charleston.”

Eschewing the offer of a bed in an officer’s house, Ruffin made another showy gesture, opting to sleep on a pallet in a tent with other volunteers. He slept well and credited this to the cold air flowing into the tent through its open front entry.

Ruffin did accept an offer to join the Palmetto Guard, a high honor. The Guard was the state’s premier militia company, staffed with the loftiest of Charleston’s gentry and bearing the name of the state’s revered emblem, the palmetto. “The Palmetto Guard,” he noted, “is composed of very select members—no one being admitted who is not perfectly respectable.”

He wrote out a formal agreement governing his status. This, too, was mainly for show, to cement his reputation as a heroic figure. He specified that he was only offering to participate in “actual military operations,” ideally as an infantryman, but once the action ended his tenure as a volunteer would expire.

IN MONTGOMERY, ON TUESDAY morning, April 9, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, his face aflame with neuralgia, decided that he had tolerated enough deception from Washington and convened a meeting of his cabinet to discuss the fate of Fort Sumter. For months the fortress, with its huge U.S. flag stretched in the wind, had sat there in Charleston Harbor—“a standing menace” (in Davis’s words) to Southern peace and independence.

Now a naval expedition of an indeterminate character was on its way to Charleston, ostensibly to provide food to a starving garrison. On the one hand the expedition appealed to the Southern sense of chivalry: No true gentleman could oppose so humanitarian an undertaking. At the same time, to allow the provisioning of the fort would mean to prolong its hated tenure in the harbor. Further, there was no guarantee that Lincoln really only intended to deliver provisions. Given the deception evident thus far in the treatment of the Confederacy’s commissioners in Washington, how much could one trust Lincoln’s notice of resupply delivered in Charleston the night before? According to news reports and supposedly authoritative telegrams from sources in Washington, the Union expedition included some of the U.S. Navy’s most potent warships, filled with guns and infantry. Suppose the provisioning of Sumter was only a ruse—that the true goal was the military reinforcement of the fort or the outright seizure of Charleston itself?

Davis had concerns even about the provenance of Lincoln’s notice. This “so-called notification,” Davis wrote later, “was a mere memorandum, without date, signature, or authentication of any kind, sent to Governor Pickens, not by an accredited agent, but by a subordinate employee of the State Department. Like the oral and written pledges of Mr. Seward, given through Judge Campbell, it seemed to be carefully and purposely divested of every attribute that could make it binding and valid, in case its authors should see fit to repudiate it.”

During the cabinet meeting Davis spoke kindly of Major Anderson, whom he considered a gallant officer and a friend; the two had fought together in the Mexican War. But Fort Sumter was an evil that had to be dealt with, and quickly. According to credible reports from Washington and New York, the U.S. fleet could reach Charleston any day. The cabinet knew of course that Confederate Secretary of War Walker had already instructed Beauregard to prevent the provisions from reaching the fort. They now leaned toward demanding that Anderson surrender the fort, and if he refused, then ordering Beauregard to destroy it.

As this debate was underway, Confederate Secretary of State Toombs joined the meeting. Once he grasped that his fellow cabinet members were discussing whether to attack Sumter, he objected. “Mr. President,” he said, “at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.”

Whether Toombs delivered his objection in such florid terms is open to question. But key accounts confirm that he did warn that an attack on Sumter would trigger a civil war “greater than any the world has yet seen.”

The cabinet reached a decision.