A Toast

APRIL 14, 1865

JUSTICE CAME IN CIRCLES. SUMTER HAD FALLEN ON APRIL 14, 1861; now, four years later, President Lincoln wanted the American flag to again fly over the fort and wanted its former commander, Robert Anderson, to raise it. He left the choreography to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had replaced Simon Cameron. Stanton directed that the flag-raising take place during a public ceremony at Sumter—or what was left of it—at noon on April 14, 1865, exactly four years to the day after Anderson and his men had evacuated the fort. They would use the same flag.

Between the day Lincoln issued his order and the date of the planned ceremony, the Civil War had all but come to an end, with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The “expiation” Lee had feared, what Mary Lincoln called “this hideous nightmare,” had come to pass, killing 750,000 Americans. South Carolina alone lost 21,000 men, more than a third of the 60,000 state citizens who fought. Its planters grieved a more venal loss: The end of slavery cost them three hundred million dollars in human capital overnight.

Anderson, now fifty-nine years old and a retired general, still possessed the Sumter flag that Confederate guns had shot down on that April afternoon four years earlier. He agreed to take part in the ceremony, though he had hoped for something different than what Stanton had in mind. His religious nature unchanged by the war, Anderson envisioned a quiet commemoration, perhaps a prayer or a moment of silence, to acknowledge the magnitude of the losses endured by both sides in the war. Stanton, however, wanted a ceremony attended by thousands, marked by great speeches, culminating with Anderson’s hauling the flag up a 150-foot flagpole newly installed on Sumter’s parade ground. Stanton’s wishes prevailed.

Workmen erected bleachers for four thousand attendees. Ships brought participants and spectators alike to Charleston for the event; two hundred came aboard the Oceanus, a steamship from New York chartered for the occasion. Among its passengers was Henry Ward Beecher, the famed abolitionist firebrand, who brought with him many members of his Brooklyn congregation. Another abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, arrived aboard the steamship Arago along with eighty other New Yorkers. John Nicolay also came to Sumter that day.

The fort now looked nothing like it had when Anderson and his garrison had occupied it. Four years of shelling by Union guns, including near constant bombardment over the previous year and a half, had reduced it to a rounded hillock of earth and shattered masonry. One discernible wall remained, dented and scaled by the impacts of hardshot and explosive shells. Two months earlier, Charleston’s mayor, Charles Macbeth, had surrendered the city to a force of Black soldiers, the 21st Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry.

The flag-raising ceremony began with a benediction by Matthias Harris, the fort’s former chaplain, the same officiant who had said a prayer for the troops after their successful move to Sumter in December 1860. Three complete Psalms followed, and part of the twentieth: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God.” Next, a senior Army official read aloud the one-paragraph report about the Sumter bombardment that Anderson had dictated while aboard the Baltic off Sandy Hook.

In the audience were members of Sumter’s original garrison, including Abner Doubleday, now a major general and a Union hero, honored for the bravery he had demonstrated at Gettysburg two years earlier. Here, too, was Peter Hart, the New York City police officer who had become an honorary member of the garrison and had rescued the fort’s flag after its staff was shot away. With the reading of Psalms concluded, Hart stepped forward carrying a mailbag that contained the original flag, nail holes and all. At this the crowd broke into a tumult of cheers. Three Navy sailors attached the flag to a halyard; they added roses, mock orange blossoms, and an evergreen wreath.

Anderson stood and stepped forward. His son, now six years old, sat nearby on the dignitaries’ platform. For a time Anderson did not speak. A brisk wind eddied his hair. One witness noted that he seemed to be “wrestling with intense emotion.”

THESE HAD BEEN A hard four years for Anderson, hard years for everyone. In the weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, North and South began massing vast numbers of troops, especially in Virginia. At first only small military engagements occurred. The “real war,” as Walt Whitman put it, did not begin until July 21, 1861, a lovely but hot Sunday when Union and Confederate forces clashed at Bull Run. Edmund Ruffin joined the fray, solemnly riding into battle on the barrel of a cannon. At one point he was invited to fire that cannon into the backs of retreating Union troops as they struggled in full panic to cross a small bridge dammed by an overturned wagon. He was delighted to do so. In the midst of the fighting, Capt. Samuel Ferguson, the Beauregard aide from Charleston, spotted Ruffin astride his cannon. He recognized him instantly. Ruffin was in the thick of it, “enveloped in smoke, seated with the cannoneers, on a caisson of a battery,” rushing full speed into action “grasping a long, old musket resting across his knees, his long, snow white hair and beard flowing in the wind—a picture never to be erased from memory.”

The next morning, Monday, in a cold mist, Ruffin and fellow soldiers rode out to scavenge the battlefield. He took great satisfaction in examining the Union dead and savored the details. “Clotted blood, in what had been pools, were under or by almost every corpse,” he wrote. “From bullet holes in the heads of some, the brains had partly oozed out. The white froth covering the mouths of others was scarcely less shocking in appearance.”

Next he rode down to the bridge to examine his own handiwork. He found only three bodies. “This was a disappointment to me,” he wrote. “I should have liked not only to have killed the greatest possible number—but also to know, if possible, which I had killed, and to see and count the bodies.”

He was gratified afterward to hear from witnesses that he may have killed as many as eight Union soldiers with that first cannon shot but that their bodies had been moved by Confederate troops assigned to collect abandoned guns and wagons. He would eventually raise this tally to fifteen, an exaggeration that he came to believe was true.

Later that Monday, Russell of the London Times, who had covered the battle, mailed his first report to London; a second would follow four days later. It took time for these “letters,” as he called them, to reach the Times’ office and for copies of the editions in which they were published to make their way back to America. By the evening of August 20, thirty days later, newspapers in New York began publishing extracts.

The battle had been a humiliating defeat for the Union. Though American newspapers had been just as damning in the immediate aftermath of the battle, by the time Russell’s detailed and vivid account appeared, the North had placed the disaster behind it. His criticism not only exhumed the hurt and humiliation, but coming as it did from a foreign observer, it seemed almost spiteful. The response was quick and harsh, the mails “swollen today by anonymous letters threatening me with bowie knife and revolver, or simply abusive, frantic with hate, and full of obscure warnings.”

Russell found himself shunned on the street, his presence met by scowls and open snubs, “women turning up their pretty little noses.” He was dubbed “Bull-Run Russell,” and this was not meant kindly. Such name-calling perplexed him: “Oddly enough, the Americans seem to think that a disgrace to their arms becomes diminished by fixing the name of the scene as a sobriquet on one who described it.”

The most cutting response came from the Lincolns. One evening Russell encountered them in their carriage. “The President was not so good-humored, nor Mrs. Lincoln so affable, in their return to my salutation as usual,” he wrote. “My unpopularity is certainly spreading upwards and downwards at the same time, and all because I could not turn the battle of Bull’s Run into a Federal victory, because I would not pander to the vanity of the people, and, least of all, because I will not bow my knee to the degraded creatures who have made the very name of a free press odious to honorable men.”

Russell was banned from military posts and forbidden to join units in action, his métier. Only one course remained. Without first conferring with his editor, Russell arranged passage back to England. He left New York on April 9, 1862, “with the head of our good ship pointing, thank Heaven, towards Europe.”

Although a clear Confederate victory, the battle at Manassas Junction, soon to be known variously as the First Manassas or the First Bull Run, came at great cost to the victors as well as the Union. On the Confederate side, the battle killed 387 men, wounded 1,582, and left thirteen missing. (Ruffin’s son Charles survived the battle but later deserted, much to his father’s shame.) The Union suffered 481 killed, 1,011 wounded, and over 1,200 missing, most presumably taken prisoner. One victim was the naïveté that had marked the attitudes of both sides in the months after Lincoln’s election, with both convinced that any war between North and South would be brief and tidy, spilling only enough blood “to fill a lady’s thimble.” They knew only what limited war looked like and lacked the visual memory and lexical tools to imagine a conflagration that would deposit corpses in their gardens, on their streets, and among the cotton bolls of their plantations.

THE BATTLE BROUGHT AN endless procession of funerals to Richmond, which in May 1861 had been designated the new capital of the Confederacy. Mosquitoes, heat, and the risk of yellow fever, as well as the promise of more and better hotel accommodations, had driven the Confederate Congress north. Here Mary Chesnut and James, now one of President Jefferson Davis’s trusted aides, had taken temporary residence. By this point, she understood that her flirtation with John Manning was over; it had been an artifact of that time when war had seemed a glorious and chivalric pursuit. Their flirtation had never been anything to her other than a distraction; to him possibly more, though he told her just before the Sumter bombardment that he wanted them to be friends. “John Manning knows I never believed in him or trusted him,” she wrote in her diary. “Snake in the grass—beautiful as he is.”

Her husband had fought well at Manassas. He, too, had been in the thick of it. “I felt so proud of my husband last night—and so happy,” Mary wrote.

On July 22, 1861, she witnessed her first funeral procession, this accompanied by a band playing a well-known funeral march by George Frideric Handel. “The empty saddle—and the led war horse—we saw and heard it all,” Mary wrote. “And now it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and it comes until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.”

A couple of days later, Edmund Ruffin—“Old Ruffin,” she called him—paid her a visit, during which he promised to give her one of the pikes he had salvaged after John Brown’s capture.

This was only the beginning, of course, but even as things grew darker, the drive for social contact, for dinners and parties and teas, continued. With food supplies dwindling, people in Richmond threw “starvation parties” with dancing and music but little or no food. Women wore secondhand gowns; jewelry was scarce, most of it having been donated to the war effort. Mary’s friend Varina made coffee from chestnuts and hickory. In an obvious effort to maintain spirits in gloomy times, the Davises held a reception every week at the executive mansion, a large gray box of a house with a tall eight-columned portico off the back.

James Chesnut found all this merrymaking hard to take. On January 5, 1864, Mary came home after a carriage drive with several companions—Varina’s sister, Maggie; Gen. John Bell Hood, now missing one leg; and Sarah “Buck” Preston, whom Hood adored—to find James “in a bitter mood,” as she put it in her diary. He suggested that “with so much human misery filling the air” she consider staying home and just thinking.

“And go mad?” she snapped back. “Catch me at it! A yawning grave—piles of red earth thrown on one side. That is the only future I ever see.”

It wasn’t just war. The wounds and deaths of battle came on top of the multitude of quotidian tragedies that occurred in any era, at any time. “You remember Emma Stockton,” Mary told James, referring to the wife of one of their mutual cousins. “She and I were as blithe as birds, that day at Mulberry. I came here the next day, and when I got here—telegram—‘Emma Stockton found dead in her bed.’ It is awfully near—that thought of death—always. No, no, I will not stop and think.”

Mary happened to be present as Varina and Jefferson Davis mourned the loss of another son, Joseph—“Little Joe”—who on April 30, 1864, fell from the roof of the portico of the executive mansion while Varina was bringing Davis dinner at his office; he died soon afterward. Mary and James went to the house, entered the drawing room, and heard Davis pacing back and forth in the room above.

“That night,” Mary wrote, “with no sound but the heavy tramp of his foot overhead, the curtains flapping in the wind, the gas flaring, I was numb—stupid—half-dead with grief and terror.”

Upon returning to South Carolina, Mary and James Chesnut found that their plantation, Mulberry, had been ransacked by Union forces. They had no money, not enough even to pay for a brief crossing on a river ferry on their journey back home. Soldiers had burned their cotton. The Chesnuts faced deep debts they had no money to pay.

Mary’s experience of the war had been sad beyond measure. Now and then she would muse upon what had occurred. In a letter from Mulberry she told a friend, “There are nights here with the moonlight, cold and ghastly, and the whippoorwills, and the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair and cry aloud for all that is past and gone.”

BY THE TIME OF Sumter’s fall, James Henry Hammond, the planter and former U.S. senator who had coined the phrase “cotton is king,” and whose proslavery writings had so influenced the South, had written nothing in his diary for over three years. He resumed making entries two days after the surrender. It became a chronicle both of his own physical decline and of his despair at the effects of war, though he had come to believe it was necessary; that only separation from the Union could save the South from abolition and the inevitable slave insurrections that would accompany it. But he recognized that the war had become something far worse than anyone had anticipated. “The War,” he wrote in 1862, “is gradually becoming on both sides one of fire and sword and extermination. Dreadful, dreadful.”

He remained a believer in the power of cotton to solve the South’s ills. “The Abolitionists can only do wanton cruelties inflicting horrid suffering on us to no purpose, for Cotton is King and the African must be a slave, or there’s an end of all things, and soon.”

But Hammond also grasped the fundamental crisis of the South, if not America as a whole. “Here we have in charge the solution of the greatest problem of the ages,” he wrote in a letter to his antislavery friend A. B. Allen in New York. “We are here two races—white and black—now both equally American, holding each other in the closest embrace and utterly unable to extricate ourselves from it. A problem so difficult, so complicated, and so momentous never was placed in charge of any portion of Mankind. And on its solution rests our all.”

Late in the grim autumn of 1864, Hammond’s health drove him to his bed for the last time. His son Edward, known by his middle name, Spann, chronicled his final decline. Hammond provided him with precise instructions as to where he was to be buried on the grounds of Redcliffe. “But mind,” Hammond said, abruptly staring at Spann and pointing his finger, “if we are subjugated, run a plow over my grave.”

Hammond summoned the enslaved children of Redcliffe and asked them to sing his favorite song, but they did not know it and he at that moment could not remember it either. He sent them away.

The next morning, as Spann watched, Hammond was overcome by a terrifying seizure, “the whole movement, manner and tone as if something over-powering had pounced upon and was grappling furiously with him.”

He died November 13, 1864, five days after the reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Hammond’s mother-daughter slave lovers, Sally and Louisa, continued to live at Redcliffe, their presence recorded by U.S. Census takers in 1880. By that point Sally and Louisa had been free for fifteen years, and Mrs. Hammond, according to one Hammond expert, had come to accept their presence.

IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING the attack on Sumter, Major Anderson’s health suffered. Lincoln had promoted him to brigadier general in charge of the Army’s Department of Kentucky, but Anderson could not tolerate the demands and sought medical help. According to the assessment of his doctor, R.M.J. Jackson, he exhibited “a frequent feeling of weariness and lassitude, incapacity to continue muscle exertion for any length of time, a consciousness of exhaustion from the most ordinary exercise, and occasional pain in the forehead and eyes.” To Jackson, the cause of these “morbid phenomena” was obvious: the intense stress of his Sumter experience, namely the protracted “anxiety,” the “painfully oppressive day and night watches,” and all the other events “necessarily experienced by a man who was doomed to watch the sharpening of the knife which was to cut his own throat.”

The doctor ordered a recuperative stay in the Allegheny Mountains at an “Orphan Sanitarium” until his health returned.

And now he was back at Sumter to raise the flag. Behind him, as captured in a photograph, the tops of masts and tall smokestacks of steamers rose above what remained of one of the fort’s massive walls, the ships’ rigging hung with banners and ensigns stretched taut by the wind. What had once been a well-defined brick rampart fifty feet high had been so heavily pummeled by Union guns that it was now a scree of disintegrated brick.

“I am here my friends, my fellow-citizens, and fellow soldiers, to perform an act of duty to my country dear to my heart, and which all of you will appreciate and feel,” Anderson began. The crowd before him had reached five thousand, filling the bleachers thigh to thigh. Soldiers and sailors stood on the last tier, straining for a view. Taking the halyard, Anderson said, “I restore to its proper place this flag which floated here during peace, before the first act of this cruel Rebellion.”

As the flag rose the crowd came to its feet waving hats and handkerchiefs, “and with one long, pealing, deafening, ecstatic shout of triumph hailed the dear flag until it touched the peak,” one writer reported. Six guns on the Sumter parapet fired. Oddly enough, given the peaceable nature of the proceeding, they fired in the direction of Charleston. The wind stretched the flag to its full dimension and the crowd began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Even then it was a difficult song to sing. Happily, the program for the event included the full lyrics for all four stanzas. Guns replied throughout the harbor, from forts Moultrie, Pinckney, and Johnson, and from Cummings Point on Morris Island, all back in Union hands. The cacophony drew hundreds of attendees to the parapet, awed by the eruptions of smoke and flame.

Anderson got his hundred-gun salute at last.

THAT NIGHT AT A special dinner at the Charleston Hotel, one of the few structures in the city’s core that remained intact, guests rose to propose what seemed to be an endless series of toasts. Doubleday honored the Sumter garrison; former secretary of war Joseph Holt toasted Anderson. At length, at around ten o’clock, Anderson himself got up and delivered what was probably the most heartfelt of the tributes. “I beg you now,” he said, “that you will join me in drinking the health of another man whom we all love to honor—the man who, when elected President of the United States, was compelled to reach the seat of government without an escort, but a man who now could travel all over our country with millions of hands and hearts to sustain him. I give you the good, the great, the honest man, Abraham Lincoln.”

He could not know it, but at that instant, Lincoln lay dying of a gunshot wound in a box at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Forever afterward John Nicolay would feel haunted by the coincidence, believing that had he not gone to Sumter for this commemoration, had he stayed behind in Washington, the assassination might not have occurred. Later, when Lincoln lay in state in Springfield, Miss Anna Ridgely, who had so harshly judged Lincoln and the town’s election celebration, encountered Nicolay and was struck by his appearance. “He looked very much fatigued and his face was the picture of despair,” she wrote. “He did not stay very long. I suppose his heart was too sad.”