WASHINGTON AND CHARLESTON

Hot Oxygen

MONDAY, APRIL 15

ON MONDAY, APRIL 15, LINCOLN ISSUED A PROCLAMATION CALLING for “the several States of the Union” to muster their militias and contribute a total of seventy-five thousand troops for the suppression of rebellious “combinations” in the seceded states and to reassert the authority of U.S. law.

“I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government,” the proclamation read. Here Lincoln, in his own handwriting, added this phrase: “and to redress wrongs already long enough endured,” a clear expression of his own frustration and lost patience.

He forecast that the first mission of this sudden new army “will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union,” though he added that “utmost care” would be taken “to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.” With that second reference to property, Lincoln sought to signal his continued commitment to protect slavery where it already existed, in the persistent hope that the border states and the upper South might still remain in the Union. Virginia was still undecided about whether to secede; delegates to its ongoing convention continued to debate the matter.

Lincoln’s proclamation ordered both houses of Congress to come back into session on July 4 “to consider and determine, such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand.” His choice of date, Independence Day, was hardly an accident; it was meant to call forth those mystic chords of memory to which he had alluded in his inaugural speech. His secretary of war set quotas for the number of troops each state should provide, the largest—seventeen regiments—for New York.

The effect of the proclamation was explosive. If there had been any hope that after Sumter passions would subside and everyone would get back to their lives, that hope was now obliterated. Northern states reacted with jubilation. “Great rejoicing here over your proclamation,” wrote Ohio governor William Dennison. In the South, however, even moderate governors professed to be enraged. “I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people,” wrote Gov. John Ellis of North Carolina, one of the four upper South states that Lincoln had hoped to retain in the Union. Tennessee’s governor vowed that the state “will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, and those of our brethren.” In Virginia, the sword at last fell: On April 17 the state’s long-seated convention voted to secede. Even staunch pro-unionist William Rives voted in favor, stating, “The Government being already overthrown by revolution, I vote ‘aye.’”

As shattering as Virginia’s act was for the North, it was heartening for the South. And it prompted celebration by fire-eater Ruffin. When the news reached Charleston on Thursday, April 18, the Courier newspaper summoned him to its offices and invited him to fire the “secession cannon,” which the newspaper had fired for every state that thus far had seceded, “one discharge for each act of secession.” That day at a dinner party Ruffin broke his lifelong policy of abstinence and had a drink. Two drinks actually: “a glass of ale, and another of wine.”

ARKANSAS FOLLOWED, APPROVING SECESSION 65 to 5; a public vote ratified it on May 6. North Carolina and Tennessee acted next. One delegate to North Carolina’s convention wrote, “This furor, this moral epidemic, swept over the country like a tempest, before which the entire populations seemed to succumb.” The border states—Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware—did not leave the Union, but they balked at Lincoln’s demand for volunteers. “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States,” wrote Gov. Beriah Magoffin. Missouri’s governor called the request “inhuman and diabolical.” Missouri would remain in the Union, but be claimed also by the Confederacy as a member state.

It was the crucible hour—the time for all to declare their loyalty, whether to nation or section. Caught up in the crisis was Virginia resident Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, whom General Scott considered to be the Army’s finest field officer. Lee was fifty-four, a storied veteran of the Mexican War, former superintendent of West Point, and the man who had quashed John Brown’s insurrection. Acting through an intermediary—Francis Blair, father of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—Lincoln offered Lee command of all Union land forces. That same day Lee learned that Virginia had seceded.

For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, “If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” He needed time. He spent two days in personal torment considering the offer before formally notifying General Scott in a letter on April 20 that he had decided to resign from the Army. He would have done it “at once,” he told Scott, “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed.”

To which Scott replied, “You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.”

Lee felt he had no choice. “Wherever the blame may be, the fact is, that we are in the midst of a fratricidal war,” Lee wrote in a letter to a Northern girl who had asked for his photograph. “I must side either with or against my section of country. I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.” He still held out hope for peace, he told her, but added: “Whatever may be the result of the contest, I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, of our national sins.”

In a letter to his sister telling her of his resignation, he wrote, “Save in defense of my native State (with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.”

But now his state, too, had seceded. Far from sheathing his sword, Lee within days proffered his services to the Confederacy.

ON THE DAY LINCOLN called for troops, London Times correspondent William Russell was midway through his journey south. He was struck by the primitive appearance of the kingdom through which his train passed. The tracks skirted the “Dismal Swamp” and plunged through what Russell called a primordial forest. At first he entertained himself by looking for alligators and large turtles, but this became monotonous. Soon he saw crude farms populated with worn-looking cattle and pigs and worn-looking people. “The women, palefaced, were tawdry and ragged; the men, yellow, seedy looking. For the first time in the States, I noticed barefooted people.”

Nonetheless, much to Russell’s amazement, at stations along the way these bleak forests yielded sophisticated travelers waiting for the train. “It really was most astonishing to see well-dressed, respectable looking men and women emerge out of the ‘dismal swamp’ and out of the depths of the forest, with silk parasols and crinoline, bandboxes and portmanteaus, in the most civilized style.” They were tended by enslaved men and women “handling the baggage or the babies, and looking comfortable enough, but not happy.”

What struck him most during the journey was the warlike character of the South’s jubilation, amplified by Lincoln’s militia proclamation. “At every station the crowds were all cheering—men, women, and children, black and white,” Russell wrote. “Some were drunk, all noisy and jubilant. Many carried shotguns, old rifles, and revolvers.” The jubilation reached the level of spectacle when the train passed through Goldsboro, North Carolina, the first significant town Russell had come to since leaving Portsmouth that morning. “The station, the hotels, the street through which the rail ran was filled with an excited mob all carrying arms, with signs here and there of a desire to get up some kind of uniform—flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for ‘Jeff Davis’ and ‘the Southern Confederacy,’ so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with ‘Dixie’s Land.’”

Russell believed that these expressions of passion and determination could lead to only one outcome. “The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words United States, the intense hatred of the Yankee on the part of these people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them,” Russell wrote. “I am more satisfied than ever that the Union can never be restored as it was and that it has gone to pieces, never to be put together again in the old shape, at all events, by any power of earth.”

TOWARD EVENING ON TUESDAY, April 16, Russell’s train reached the outskirts of Charleston, where he got his first look at the source of all the turmoil and celebration. “Cavalry horses were picketed in the fields, tents were visible in the woods, and troops were marching as if at drill on the meadows,” he wrote in a report to his newspaper. “A block-like building shimmered through the haze, rising island-like from the sea. Smoke curled upwards from an angle of the wall.” The Confederate “Stars and Bars” flew above. When someone shouted “There’s Sumter!” the passengers cheered with joy. Russell found the city enraptured. “Charleston was in high revelry—triumph on every face, and an immense clinking of sabers and clatter of spurs and steel.

“In the middle of these excited gatherings,” Russell wrote, “I felt like a man in the full possession of his senses coming in late to a wine party.”

He checked into the Mills House, then set out to introduce himself to the local powers. At the Charleston Club on Meeting Street he talked with a number of the city’s chivalry, including James Chesnut and John Manning. The conversation grew heated. Russell found the men full of confident menace not just toward Yankees, but also any potential British interference. They were convinced that Britain, once confronted with the loss of Southern cotton, would ally itself with the Confederacy—the “cotton is king” thesis famously articulated in the U.S. Senate by James Henry Hammond. Russell tried to persuade them otherwise, with no success. “I found this was the fixed idea everywhere. The doctrine of ‘cotton is king,’ to them is a lively all powerful faith without distracting heresies or schisms.”

The next day, Wednesday, April 17, Russell at last got to visit Sumter itself during a special excursion arranged by Beauregard’s staff, men who in their past lives had been senators and governors. Russell wondered at the flamboyance of their uniforms: blue caps embroidered with palmetto trees; blue coats; shoulder straps trimmed with lace; gilt buttons; blue trousers adorned with gold cord; brass spurs—all this despite sweltering heat.

The massive brick-sheathed walls of the fort were pocked and gouged by shot, the edges of the parapets torn and jagged, but otherwise the structure seemed to Russell to have sustained little serious damage, “no injury of a kind to render the work untenable.” The worst damage seemed to be the destruction by fire of the barracks within the walls.

Overall he found himself unimpressed. Having witnessed the last charge of the Light Brigade and the siege of Sevastopol, he was perplexed by Sumter’s outsized importance. He wrote later, “A very small affair, indeed, that shelling of Sumter.”

AS DARKNESS FELL, the steamer arrived back at Charleston’s wharf. The city was ablaze with lights and war fervor. Drums rumbled, bands played; cheers and shouting rose everywhere. “The streets of Charleston present some such aspect of those of Paris in the last revolution,” Russell wrote. “Crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets. The battle-blood running through their veins—that hot oxygen which is called ‘the flush of victory’ on the cheek; restaurants full, reveling in barrooms, club-rooms crowded, orgies and carousing in tavern or private house, in taproom, from cabaret—down narrow alleys, in the broad highway.”

For Charleston’s enslaved and free Blacks the celebrations of their white overmen seemed to have little meaning. As Russell walked back to his hotel, a heavy bell began to ring, and he was passed by a swiftly moving mass of humanity, “the evening drove of Negroes, male and female, shuffling through the streets in all haste, in order to escape the patrol and the last peal of the curfew bell.”