CHARLESTON

Acclaim

APRIL 14–15

IT WAS ONLY ON SUNDAY, APRIL 14, THAT THE TIMES’ RUSSELL AT LAST realized that Fort Sumter had indeed been bombarded, and had fallen, and that something larger and more tragic had begun to unfold.

He had spent the previous night aboard the steamer Georgiana, which took him from Baltimore to Norfolk. It was a hard night, during which he was kept awake by noise and the predations of mosquitoes, which made their way into his room despite the rough gauze curtains that were supposed to protect against them. Unable to sleep, with little blood left to give and breakfast not yet available, he dressed and walked the ship. He found its barroom full despite the early hour, with passengers having cocktails, especially mint juleps. “In the matter of drinks, how hospitable the Americans are!” Russell wrote. “I was asked to take as many as would have rendered me incapable of drinking again; my excuse on the plea of inability to grapple with cocktails and the like before breakfast was heard with surprise, and I was urgently entreated to abandon so bad a habit.”

The ship reached the wharf at Norfolk before seven o’clock that morning and was greeted by men calling out the news. “The Yankees out of Sumter! Isn’t it fine!” Russell spotted a few men who did not share this sentiment, whose expressions were “black as night,” but the overall atmosphere was one of great celebration. After disembarking, Russell boarded a steam ferry that took passengers across a creek to Norfolk proper.

The city had a decayed air. “An execrable, tooth-cracking drive ended at last in front of the Atlantic Hotel, where I was doomed to take up my quarters,” Russell wrote. Mosquitoes clouded its hallways. “It is a dilapidated, uncleanly place, with tobacco-stained floor, full of flies and strong odors. The waiters were all slaves: untidy, slip-shod, and careless creatures.”

A passerby dragged Russell to the office of a local newspaper, where a fresh telegraphic bulletin had just arrived. “The Yankees are whipped!” the man told him. Russell found a dirty sheet of yellow paper posted on a wall that carried an account of the shelling. He heard “joy and gratification” all around him. “Now I confess I could not share in the excitement at all,” he wrote. “The act seemed to me the prelude to certain war.” Convinced at last that the fort really had fallen, and dismayed at his own poor timing, Russell wrote to a colleague, “I hear today that I am late for the fair.” He resolved to continue south anyway.

The closer he got to Charleston, the wilder the celebrations became, the more visceral the declamations of hatred for the North and of the willingness to kill to sustain some inchoate standard of Southern life, foremost of which was the right to enslave Blacks.

Everywhere he saw the new Confederate flag—the first iteration, called the “Stars and Bars”: three broad horizontal bands of red and white, and a blue square in the upper-left corner with seven white stars, one for each seceded state. This flag would prove dangerously problematic, mistaken in battle for the American Stars and Stripes. A new flag would soon take its place, designed by General Beauregard, to prevent confusion: a perfect square, with a diagonal blue cross on a red background, and stars on the blue shafts of the cross—the flag that would grace Southern picnics and fly over Southern courthouses well into the twenty-first century.

At every stop Russell found “flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths.” Bands of musicians played “Dixie’s Land” with varying success. The countryside through which his train traveled seemed wholly engulfed by revolutionary passion. “It was a saturnalia,” Russell wrote. “What would the President do? How would the people of the North assert themselves? Was Fort Sumter a Bastille? Had the federal government gone down before a revolution like a Bourbon or an Orleans dynasty?”

At Portsmouth, Virginia, he boarded a train for the last and most revelatory leg of his journey.