WASHINGTON

The Correspondent

THURSDAY, APRIL 11

ON THURSDAY, APRIL 11, WILLIAM RUSSELL OF THE LONDON TIMES set out for dinner at the “modest” lodgings of the man in charge of military forces guarding Washington, Gen. Winfield Scott. As Russell arrived, he found soldiers on horseback out front “parading up and down the street.” Inside he again encountered William Seward. Also present was Attorney General Bates and at least one other military officer, Maj. George W. Cullum, a stern-eyed Army engineer who had supervised the construction of many U.S. fortifications, among them Fort Sumter, and whose engineering feats included a berm of deftly repositioned hair that closely covered his bald scalp.

The dinner was well underway—“a most excellent dinner,” Russell noted, with wines from France, Spain, and Madeira—when an orderly arrived bearing a dispatch. General Scott took it and read it and apologized for his rudeness in doing so, but said it was from Lincoln.

He handed it to Seward.

THE COMMUNIQUÉ CLEARLY CAUGHT Seward’s attention. “The Secretary read it, and became a little agitated,” Russell saw, “and raised his eyes inquiringly to the General’s face, who only shook his head.”

Seward passed the dispatch to Attorney General Bates, “who read it and gave a grunt, as it were, of surprise.”

In order to give Seward, Scott, and Bates a chance to discuss the message in private, Russell walked outside into the garden accompanied by Major Cullum. Russell lit a cigar. The major pointed toward two soldiers standing watch and said there were others posted around the house to protect General Scott. Russell found this surprising: “a curious state of things for the commander of the American army, in the midst of a crowded city, the capital of the free and enlightened Republic, to be placed in!”

When they went back inside they learned the contents of the message: The South Carolina batteries arrayed around Charleston Harbor had been ordered to fire on Sumter if Anderson did not surrender.

DINNER LASTED ANOTHER HOUR or so. Afterward, Seward took Russell back to the Willard. They drove up Pennsylvania Avenue, which was empty of people and traffic. Along the way, Russell asked Seward whether he was concerned about the possibility of an attack on Washington from adjacent Virginia. Unconfirmed reports held that a force of five hundred men had gathered to enact “some daring enterprise,” Russell wrote—possibly the kidnapping of Lincoln and his cabinet.

Seward acknowledged that the capital was vulnerable, “almost defenseless,” but added that the South was no more ready for armed conflict than the North; both sides, he said, were “equally unprepared for active measures of aggression.”

Russell decided to leave for Charleston the next day, Friday, April 12. He would first go north to Baltimore to catch a southbound steamship. He left the Willard at six P.M. in “a storm of rain” and arrived in Baltimore two hours later, where he found the city’s streets coursing with water. At his hotel, Eutaw House, a nineteen-thousand-square-foot box of brick-sheathed luxury in the center of the city, an employee told him the bombardment of Fort Sumter had begun. Russell was skeptical; he had heard many such reports over prior days, none true.

He made his way to the hotel bar and found it packed, the air vibrating with talk of Sumter. “I was asked by many people whom I had never seen in my life, what my opinions were as to the authenticity of the rumor.”

But Russell now found himself in an unaccustomed position: He was just as much in the dark as they were.