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

“radishes in the market”) that “they were in the utmost state of excitement & the least thing would have fired them, & then riots must have followed.” Mixed snow and rain fell the next day, but “flags large & small flaunt from every building, the dry-goods shops have red, white & blue materials draped together in their windows, in the ribbon stores the national colors hang in long streamers, and even the book sellers place the red, white, and blue bindings together.”

On the day following, their newspaper was “stolen from the door step again.”

Fifteen miles away, in rural Chester County, the news of the fall of Fort Sumter came over the telegraph wire to West Chester, the county seat, on Sunday evening, April 14. The next morning, the national flag was flying everywhere through the town. Across Chester County, in Upper Uwchlan Township, an immense Stars and Stripes was hoisted up an eighty-foot pole in front of the local tavern, and in the evening the county courthouse was thrown open for a mass Union rally.2 Far to the north, at Maine’s Bowdoin College, a professor and former pupil of Calvin Stowe who had once sat in the Stowe parlor listening to Harriet Beecher Stowe read drafts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was seized with anger that “the flag of the Nation had been insulted” and “the integrity and the existence of the People of the United States had been assailed in open and bitter war.” His name was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and an “irresistible impulse” came over him to abandon the teaching of rhetoric at Bowdoin and join the army to become God’s minister “in a higher sense than the word.”3

To the west, the news of the first shot fell on the Ohio legislature when “a senator came in from the lobby in an excited way” and cried out, “‘The telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!’” There was a sick moment of silence, and then “a woman’s shrill voice” called out from the gallery, “Glory to God!” It was the voice of Abby Kelley, the veteran abolitionist for whose sake William Lloyd Garrison had broken up the American Anti-Slavery Society two decades before. Kelley had come to believe, with John Brown, that “only through blood” could the freedom of the slaves be won, and now the redeeming blood of the abolition martyrs could begin to flow. The next day, the news of Anderson’s surrender came over the wires, and “the flag—The Flag—flew out to the wind from every housetop in our great cities.” Ohio judge Thomas Key stopped State Senator Jacob Dolson Cox in the Ohio Senate hall: “Mr. Cox, the people have gone stark mad!” Cox, a staunch anti-slavery Whig turned Republican, replied, “I knew they would if a blow were struck against the flag.”4

Six hundred miles to the South, the English newspaperman and war correspondent William Howard Russell had gone to church on Sunday morning, April 14, in a small Episcopal parish in Norfolk, Virginia. “The clergyman or minister had got to the Psalms” when a man slipped into the back of the church and began whispering excitedly to the first people he could speak to. The whispering rose in volume, while some of the people at the back “were stealing on tiptoe out of the church.” The minister doggedly plunged on through the liturgy, and the people gradually began to heave themselves up and walk out, until at length Russell “followed the example” and left the minister to finish the service on his own. Outside in the street, Russell found a crowd running through the street. “Come along, the telegraph’s in at the Day Book. The Yankees are whipped!” Russell was told. “At all the street corners men were discussing the news with every symptom of joy and gratification.” That night, in Richmond, “bonfires and fireworks of every description were illuminating in every direction—the whole city was a scene of joy owing to [the] surrender of Fort Sumter”—and Virginia wasn’t even then part of the Confederacy.5

Further south, in what was now the Confederate States of America, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, received a telegram from P. G. T. Beauregard at 2:00 PM on April 13, informing Davis, “Quarters in Sumter all burned down. White flag up. Have sent a boat to receive surrender.” Davis wired back his congratulations, and added, “If occasion offers, tender my friendly remembrance to Major Anderson.”6 He went to bed, gloomy with the foreboding that Lincoln and the North would soon retaliate. Davis had never been able to make his fellow Southerners understand that secession would mean war with the Northern states, and a long war at that. “You overrate the risk of war,” the governor of Mississippi had assured Davis. “I only wish I did,” Davis replied.

Outside, in the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, the crowds cheered and cheered.7

WAR OF THE THOUSAND-COLORED UNIFORMS

The bombardment and seizure of Fort Sumter was an act of aggression that no one, least of all President Lincoln, could afford to ignore. What the Confederate forces had done in Charleston harbor was, technically speaking, nothing different from John Brown’s assault on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, a deliberate and hostile act of war, with the added flavor of treason. It destroyed at one stroke all real hope for negotiation or compromise and left it up to Lincoln to demonstrate whether or not the federal government was prepared to back up its denial of the right to secession with force. Long ago, in 1856, Lincoln had warned the Democrats that a Republican administration would not allow the Union to be dissolved, and “if you attempt it, we won’t let you.” At the same time he dismissed all serious talk of secession as “humbug—nothing but folly.”8 Now the talk had to be turned into iron reality.

But what means did Lincoln have at his disposal to suppress the Confederate rebellion? The United States Army consisted of only ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, and five of cavalry (including dragoons