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

immediately cut Sumter off from all mail and local food supplies and begun erecting ominous batteries of cannon around the harbor perimeter. In his dispatch, Anderson warned the new president that he had only enough food for six weeks more in the fort, and at the end of that time he would be compelled to surrender.86 What did Lincoln propose to do?

For three weeks Lincoln weighed the alternatives before him. On one hand, he could attempt to resupply Sumter, but with the example of the Star of the West before him, he knew that any such attempt would provoke a shooting match, which he would be held responsible for starting—contrary to all of his assurances to the slave states over the past three months, and in full confirmation of all the wild accusations about his aggressive designs on the South. That, in turn, could easily cause not only a full-fledged civil war but also a fresh round of secessions, this time in the upper South. On the other hand, Lincoln could order Sumter evacuated; in that event, he knew, the credibility of his presidency and the Republican administration would be in pieces before either had scarcely begun.

On March 29, after polling his cabinet for the second time on the question, Lincoln decided. He ordered a supply flotilla prepared and sent to Charleston, then sat back to await the unpleasant outcome. If the flotilla succeeded in resupplying Sumter, then federal authority in South Carolina had been preserved, and Charleston could do little short of war to change it; if it failed, the failure would be due to Charleston’s decision to open fire, and the onus of beginning a civil war would lie on their heads. Clearly, Lincoln was not trying to provoke war; but it was also true that either way, Charleston lost and Lincoln won, and years afterward people would become convinced that Lincoln had rigged it all deliberately to have a civil war begin that way.87

As it turned out, the Confederates did not wait for the flotilla to arrive. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate cabinet in Montgomery were notified of Lincoln’s resupply mission on April 10, and the next day they ordered the Confederate commander in Charleston—a dashing French Louisianan named Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—to demand Anderson’s surrender, or else proceed to level the fort.88 Anderson rejected Beauregard’s demand, and at 4:30 am on April 12, 1861, the Confederate batteries ringing Charleston harbor opened fire on Anderson’s pitiful little garrison. For thirty-four hours Anderson’s two companies fought back until their ammunition was exhausted and the interior of the fort was hopelessly ablaze. On April 14 Anderson lowered his flag, and marched out of the battered fort, remarkably without having lost a single man of his garrison during the bombardment.

That night, the observatory at Harvard College noted the advent of an enormous comet. In the estimate of the venerable British astronomer Sir John Herschel, it “exceeded in brilliancy all other comets that he had ever seen,” and until it passed its perihelion and faded from view in December, it was “the most brilliant that has appeared for centuries, and one of the most remarkable on record.” Of course, cautioned a writer for the Danville Quarterly Review, people no longer regarded comets “as omens of impending evil, or messengers of an angry Deity.” Looking back from the vantage point of the next four years, the Review might not have felt so confident.89

CHAPTER FOUR

TO WAR UPON SLAVERY

THE EAST AND EMANCIPATION, 1861–1862

On the “most exquisite morning” of April 15, 1861, Sarah Butler Wister rose early to take a bundle of letters to the post office near her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown. To her annoyance, she found that their newspaper had been stolen from their doorstep. But soon she and her husband, Dr. Owen Jones Wister, found that they needed no newspapers to learn what was happening in the world. “All the world was awake & alive with the news that Ft. Sumter has surrendered,” she confided to her diary.1

The news of the fall of Fort Sumter set off a string of contradictory emotions in Sarah Butler Wister. Her father was Pierce Butler, a Georgia planter and Democratic politician, and the mail that morning contained a letter from her father describing a guided tour he had received of the Charleston harbor batteries by “Gen. Beauregard & other officers.” Her mother, however, was the celebrated English Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble, who had married Pierce Butler in 1834 and lived to regret it. The life Kemble led on the Butler plantation was miserable beyond description, and the lot of the Butler family slaves was even more miserable. Divorcing Butler, Kemble returned to England and the stage in 1845, and would later publish a Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, which painted slavery in its vilest colors. Sarah Butler had been born in 1835 in Philadelphia (Pierce Butler had inherited land in both Philadelphia and Georgia from the two very different sides of his family) and married Owen Jones Wister there in 1859. Her opinions on slavery flowed all in her mother’s direction.

Both the weather and the news turned darker through the day. While “the latter part of the day was gloomy and forbidding,” she heard rumors of “thousands… furious at the news of the surrender,” marching in the streets of Philadelphia “& swearing revenge on all disunionists or disaffected.” Robert Tyler, the son of former president John Tyler, “literally fled before them,” and the crowd “visited the houses, stores & offices of” Southerners who had made themselves “especially odious in the last few days.” The mob was in the streets again the next day (“oh how thankful I am for Father’s absence”) and had to be pacified by speeches and threats from Mayor Alexander Henry. Not that Sarah Wister really minded them: “They were the most moderate, mannerly mob ever heard of.” At the same time, though, she saw in their faces (when she went out to buy