Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

to carry the Lecompton constitution through an unwilling Congress in 1858, and so his efforts at compromise, sincere but halfhearted, died wordlessly on his own goal line. Republican intransigence was hardly Buchanan’s only problem. Buchanan might have found secession a little more tolerable, or at least a little more ignorable, if the secessionists had not themselves kept pushing on what was, for Buchanan, a particularly touchy question of honor: the disposition of federal property in the seceding states. “If a separation had been sought by the slave-holding States… through peaceful means alone, it might have been ultimately conceded by the Northern States,” wrote Buchanan’s secretary of the Treasury, John Dix.83

The United States government owned and operated a mint in New Orleans, a network of post offices throughout the South, two major arsenals full of weapons, several storage arsenals in major cities, and nine forts—and the secessionists were not willing to leave them alone. Since the employees of the mint, the post offices, and the arsenals were both civilians and compliant Southerners, the seceding states simply appropriated the facilities for their own use before Buchanan or anyone else could have anything to say in the matter. The forts, however, were a different matter altogether. As U.S. military installations, they were garrisoned and commanded by the United States Army. Unless the seceders were exceptionally bold (as at Fort Pulaski) or the federal officers exceptionally unreliable, the seceders would hesitate to risk an armed confrontation with the federal government, and so the forts were left alone. In leaving them alone, the seceders only created trouble for themselves, since the continued presence of the federal government’s authority in these forts only festered in the minds of the secessionists, not to mention discrediting the authority of the movement in the eyes of the other slave states, who still remained undecided about secession. And none of those forts produced more irritation than the three forts that sat quietly brooding over the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

Only one of the Charleston forts, Fort Moultrie, was seriously occupied by the two artillery companies that constituted Charleston’s federal garrison. Of the other two, Castle Pinckney was an obsolete relic of the eighteenth century, and Fort Sumter was an incomplete brick pentagon sitting on a man-made island of granite rubble beside the main ship channel. Under pressure from the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan probably would have been willing to negotiate with South Carolina over the future of the forts; presumably to pave the way for those negotiations, the secretary of war, a pro-secession Virginian named John B. Floyd, sent the Charleston garrison a slaveholding Kentucky major of artillery, Robert Anderson, as its new commander in November 1860. Anderson’s orders were to avoid provocations, carry out military business as usual, and make no changes in his dispositions unless he felt his garrison was actually threatened in some way. That, and a little time, would ensure that the Charleston forts could be turned over, either to Lincoln so that Buchanan could retire in peace, or to the South Carolinians without a messy confrontation.

Anderson was a Southerner, but he was also a career regular army officer whose first loyalty was to the honor of the United States. Anderson first surveyed the decaying ramparts of Fort Moultrie, then sized up the growing numbers of armed South Carolina militia keeping watch over Fort Moultrie. Six days after South Carolina uproariously adopted its secession ordinance, Anderson exercised the discretion granted him by his orders and changed his dispositions. Under cover of night, he evacuated his two companies from Moultrie and rowed them over to Sumter, where no one in Charleston had a hope of laying hands on them. The next morning Anderson raised his flag “to the top of the staff, the band broke out with the national air of ‘Hail Columbia,’ and loud and exultant cheers, repeated again and again, were given by the officers, soldiers, and workmen.”84

An “outrageous breach of faith” was how the Charleston Mercury characterized Anderson’s move. The North, by contrast, hailed Anderson as a hero, a patriot who at last had the courage to defy the secession bluster. President Buchanan was angered by Anderson’s move and was inclined to order Anderson back to Moultrie. But when it appeared that Northern public opinion was solidly behind Anderson, Buchanan changed his mind and attempted to persuade the South Carolinians to accept Anderson’s occupation of Fort Sumter as a legitimate exercise of federal authority. The South Carolina government, however, stopped its ears. Nothing now would satisfy their injured pride but the unconditional surrender of Sumter, and on January 9, 1861, when the steamer Star of the West (“a mere transport, utterly unfitted to contend with shore batteries”) entered Charleston harbor with provisions and reinforcements for Sumter, South Carolina militia opened fire on it with several cannon and forced the ship to withdraw. Only Anderson’s restraint in refusing to open fire himself on the South Carolinians kept civil war from breaking out at that moment.85 From that time onward, Anderson took nothing further for granted. His eighty-five-man force of soldiers, bandsmen, and civilian workers mounted a total of sixty powerful cannon inside the fort, and he brought the uncompleted fort as close to war readiness as possible.

Anderson’s refusal to take the firing on the Star of the West as a signal for him to bombard the city of Charleston also made it possible for Buchanan to escape from office without further incident. Lincoln formally assumed office from Buchanan on March 4, 1861, and in his inaugural address he made it as clear as he could that he had no intention of backing down in his support of Major Anderson. However, as Anderson himself informed Lincoln in a dispatch received on the evening of the inaugural, the real question was not whether the government would support Anderson but whether Anderson could support himself. When the new Confederate States government had officially taken over control of the Charleston harbor defenses on March 1, it had