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BOOK II
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR
CHAPTER XI
The Reduction of Fort Sumter
The events that brought about the Confederate War, the conditions and circumstances under which it occurred, and the passions and prejudices which inspired that bloody and most lamentable conflict have been sufficiently and quite truthfully set forth, the author believes, in the preceding chapters of this work. He has sought to show them forth without prejudice, and in a spirit of the utmost candor and fairness. It is the function of the historian to record facts, not to complain of them; to describe conditions, not to criticize them.
After nearly half a century of study it is the firm conviction of the present historian that the Confederate war was a necessary and unescapable result of historic conditions; that nobody in particular was to blame for it, because there was nobody who could have prevented or averted it. History and circumstance had combined to compel its occurrence, and for its occurrence no person and no party was in any accountable way responsible. It occurred because the logic of circumstance compelled it, and it was fought out with conscience upon both sides.
Incidentally there were wrongs done in its conduct, quite as a matter of course. He must be a stupid reader of history who does not understand that the doing of wrong is inevitable in every great historical event. But he must also be a very stupid and prejudiced reader of history who can contemplate the story of the Confederate war without realizing that on the one side and on the other conscience was the inspiring motive of it. He must be dull indeed who fails to see that devotion had its part to play on both sides and that on both sides it played it well, to the everlasting glory of the American name.
The story of the war on the one side, and on the other, is a story of American heroism in courage and in endurance, in battle and in camp, in action and in the patient submission to hardship, in dash and in defeat, in assault and in retreat. The purpose of the succeeding chapters is to tell that story without passion or prejudice, without fear or favor, and with no flinching from the truth, whithersoever it may lead.
So far as actual fighting was concerned, the war began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor on the morning of April 12, 1861.
When President Lincoln was inaugurated, the total military force at command of the Government amounted to a mere handful of men, and these were mainly occupied with the duty of garrisoning frontier posts and maintaining the subjection of the Indians. So far as eastern positions were concerned there were scarcely enough men in the forts to take care of the government property there and perform a perfunctory guard duty.
The total force in Charleston Harbor consisted of seventy men under command of Major Robert Anderson. This force occupied Fort Moultrie, at that time an indefensible position by reason of the unfinished character of its fortifications and the ease of approach to it from the land side.
As a matter of military prudence and under a threat of war, Major Anderson decided to transfer his little force to the far more defensible and, to Charleston, the far more threatening work, Fort Sumter. This he did in the early morning of December 26, 1860.
This military transfer of force from an indefensible to a defensible work, was construed by the Confederates to be a distinct violation of the agreement which had been made by the Buchanan administration, to the general effect that, pending final negotiations, there should be no change made in the military situation at any point in the South.
Major Anderson's transfer of his little force from Fort Moultrie, where it might easily have been captured from the land side to the sea-girt fortress in the middle of the harbor, was held to be a violation of this compact. Without going into the lawyers' quibbles concerning that question, let us recognize the situation and relate the events that grew out of it.
The Confederates, under the skilled direction of General Beauregard, a little later began the construction of works and the emplacement of guns that should completely command Fort Sumter. There was in all this a good deal of the "fuss and feathers" that plays so large a part in the beginning of every war made by a people wholly unused to military operations. With a field battery and one columbiad or one Dahlgren gun, General Beauregard could easily have reduced Fort Sumter on any one of the long days of waiting and preparation. Or, with a single battalion of determined men he could have taken it by assault in spite of such resistance as its feeble defending force could have offered. But those were the days of spectacular effects. The "pomp and circumstance of glorious war" were necessary agents in the work of so exciting the southern mind as to overcome the reluctance of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri to join the seceding column. So pomp and circumstance were freely invoked.
General Beauregard's preparations for the reduction of a brick fort which must quickly crumble under an efficient artillery fire, defended as it was by less than a single company of men, were such as might have been made for the reduction of some fortress like that at Gibraltar, or the elaborate works in the Bermuda Islands.
But it was not the purpose of either side to bring on the inevitable war as yet. The quibbling lawyers and phrase-mongering diplomatists were busy at work in wordy fence, each trying to force upon the other the technical responsibility of beginning the war by some act of forcible aggression.
On both sides every nerve was strained to make military preparations, precisely as if the coming of war had been recognized as certain – as in fact it was – while on both sides there was a jealously maintained pretense of entirely peaceful purposes. The organization of military forces on either side was easily explainable and excusable upon the plea of prudence and of a necessary preparation for conceivably possible emergencies, and on both sides these preparations for war served to arouse the fighting instincts of the populace and thus to make war more and more obviously inevitable.
During the first forty days or so of Mr. Lincoln's administration there was nothing done that was not in consonance with the Buchanan program of peace and waiting. Nothing was undertaken of a more positive character than the acts of the Buchanan rule. So far as proclamations and professions and pledges of peaceful purpose were concerned there was no change either for better or for worse.
In his inaugural address Mr. Lincoln outlined his policy by saying of the administration that it aimed only at the preservation of the Union. He said, "It will constitutionally maintain and defend itself. In doing this there need be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among people anywhere. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."
All this was very specious and to the Northern mind convincing, but it ignored the fundamental fact that the seceding states claimed a constitutional right to secede and that having exercised that asserted right, they denied the right of the United States Government to "hold, occupy and possess," forts, arsenals or custom houses within their territory, or within that territory to "collect duties and imposts." The very vitals of the question at issue were involved in that assumption of right on the part of the Federal Government to impose and enforce laws and imposts, and to assert and maintain rights of property possession within the territories of states that had, as they resolutely contended, taken themselves out of the Union by rigidly constitutional methods.
It is not purposed here idly and uselessly to discuss this constitutional question. It is only intended to show how it presented itself to the minds of men on the one side and upon the other. To the Northern mind, which had forgotten its own pleas for disunion and its own claims of the right of any state to secede, Mr. Lincoln's declared purpose seemed an altogether righteous and reasonable proposal of governmental activity and necessary national self-assertion. To the Southern mind, in which the traditional doctrine survived of the right of any state to secede at will, it seemed a proposal of intolerable aggression.
If the seceding states had acted within their constitutional right in seceding, then they were no longer within the dominion or in any remotest way subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Any attempt on the part of that government to exercise jurisdiction or to "collect duties and imposts" within their borders was a trespass upon their independence, an affront to their dignity, an invasion of their sovereignty, in brief an act of direct war upon them.
Mr. Lincoln's inaugural address, as the Southerners held, begged the whole question at issue. It assumed that secession was an unconstitutional nullity and that the seceding states were still in the Union and still subject to its laws, its imposts and its duties. That was the whole matter in dispute. If that assumption was correct then it was permitted to him to use any force he might see fit to employ with which to compel them to obedience. But if the assumption was incorrect – if those seceding states had in fact constitutionally withdrawn from the Union, as they contended that they had done – then he had no more right to exercise authority, to enforce laws, to possess "places and property" or to "collect duties and imposts" within their boundaries than he had to do the same within the domains of Britain, France or Germany. This was the very marrow of the question at issue.
Mr. Lincoln's words spoken in his inaugural address were meant to be placative to Southern sentiment and to minister to that reconciliation which from beginning to end was the sincerest desire of his soul. But they were based upon a seemingly total misconception. They constituted a refusal to recognize what the South held to be a fundamental fact. Mr. Lincoln's placative words did not placate for the reason that they completely ignored the Southern contention. They became instead, directly offensive as an assertion of the wrongfulness of secession, and its utter lack of constitutional authority.
His words, the men of the South thought, claimed either too much or greatly too little.
All this was only a part and a small part of the fencing by which the men in high place on either side sought in that troubled time to shift, each to the others' shoulders, responsibility for the actual and brutal beginning of a war which was clearly inevitable, and the occurrence of which had been made steadily more and more a necessity by the events of history during generations past.
In the meanwhile both sides were making every possible preparation for a war that had not been declared, a war that both professed to regard as unnecessary, a war for the outbreak of which each was determined that the other and not itself should bear all the blame.
The Congress at Washington had adjourned at the beginning of March without making any warlike appropriations whatsoever. Forty days of Mr. Lincoln's administration had passed without the calling of a regiment or a company or even a soldier into the field. Congress had indeed passed a resolution declaring its purpose to avoid war and its conviction that every possible concession should be made by Northern sentiment in avoidance of that terrible catastrophe.
It had resolved:
"That the existing discontents among the Southern people, and the growing hostility to the Federal Government among them, are greatly to be regretted; and that whether such discontents and hostility are without just cause or not, any reasonable proper and constitutional remedies and additional and more specific guarantees of their peculiar rights and interests, as recognized by the Constitution, necessary to preserve the peace of the country and the perpetuity of the Union, should be promptly and cheerfully granted."
But how much did this resolution signify? It was passed by more than a two-thirds majority of a rump House of Representatives after the Southern members of that body had withdrawn from it. It therefore seemed to represent Northern and Republican sentiment. But the Senate rejected it and it came to nothing. It was a resolve that concessions should be made and that new guarantees should be given in the interest of the Union's preservation. But, the Southerners pointed out, the concessions were not made and the new guarantees were not given.
It was impossible, in fact, that these things should be done. It was easy for Congress to resolve that "any reasonable, proper and constitutional remedies and additional and more specific guarantees" should be given, but quite another thing to secure the execution of such a program. One house of Congress vetoed the action of the other on every such resolution and both refused to put the guarantees into legal form. Northern sentiment saw and resented in every such proposition a suggestion of still further concession to that slave power which Northern sentiment had come to abhor with all the loathing that is possible to the human mind, and Northern sentiment would have no part or lot in concession to a system which under compulsion of the Constitution it might tolerate but to the perpetuation of which it would on no account lend a hand.
On the other side the extremists of the South asked for no further guarantees and trusted none that might be offered. They contended that the guarantees of the Constitution itself had been nullified by the laws of the Northern States; that every compromise had been broken; that, as they insisted, Northern sentiment had openly and distinctly approved of servile insurrection, with all the horror that it must imply, as a means of abolishing slavery; and that there was no further hope of reconciliation by virtue of paper guarantees which the Federal Government had no adequate power to enforce.
The issue had, in fact, been made up and all attempts at compromise were futile folly. The war to which the country's history and politics for half a century past had been leading had at last come and the only real question that remained to be settled was that of who should begin the actual fighting. That detail was of no real importance.
The South bore its part in all this by-play and coquetry of endeavors at reconciliation. It sent distinguished men as delegates to plead for peace at Washington, either, as some of them urged, upon some basis of compromise or, as others insisted, upon a governmental recognition of secession as a right and a fact, the recognition of which would indeed have furnished a peaceful remedy for ills otherwise irremediable, an easy and peaceful way out of a controversy that otherwise threatened a savage, brutal and peculiarly devastating war. But that remedy was obviously and absurdly impossible of adoption in the circumstances then existing.
Neither side was in the least degree disposed to accept or even seriously to consider the peace proposals of the other. Neither being willing to yield a single item of its contention, there was no ground or chance of compromise. It was clearly understood upon both sides that war was presently to come.
On both sides there was an active sharpening of swords and a diligent rubbing up of guns that might prove serviceable in war.
At the South practically all the able-bodied young men were enlisted in what were then called "volunteer companies," though it did not yet appear in what cause they were supposed to be volunteering. They were drilled and disciplined and made into something at least remotely resembling soldiers. Their familiarity with firearms and their habits of strenuous outdoor life fitted them for comparatively easy transformation into troops.
At the North there was an equally active preparation for war. Among other warlike initiatives a fleet was preparing for the relief of Fort Sumter or at the least for a threatening manifestation off Charleston harbor. It had every equipment – even to surf boats for use in enforced landings – that such a fleet could require, and it presently sailed. Neither mail nor telegraphic communication between the North and the South had as yet been interfered with, and so every detail of preparation made upon either side was instantly reported to the other.
These were the conditions in which the actual struggle approached. When on the night after Christmas Major Anderson transferred his little handful of men under cover of darkness from the hopelessly indefensible works of Fort Moultrie to the seemingly much stronger position at Fort Sumter, the Confederates clamorously contended that the change was a violation of the Buchanan administration's promise to maintain the military status quo. They seized upon the occurrence as an excuse for that erection of batteries around the harbor which has already been spoken of. In the meanwhile they courteously extended the hospitalities of the city of Charleston to Major Anderson, freely permitting him to send men ashore and to supply himself in the Charleston markets with fresh vegetables, butter, eggs, milk and whatever else he needed for the comfort of his command.
But when an attempt was made during the Buchanan administration to provision Fort Sumter for a siege, the steamer Star of the West, which carried the supplies, was forbidden to approach the fort and compelled to put again to sea.
Then followed negotiations which were marked by all that suave and gentle courtesy which characterizes the preliminary communications between duelists who intend presently to shoot one another.
The state of South Carolina, claiming to be an independent sovereignty and a member of a new and sovereign confederacy, courteously asked the United States Government to withdraw its military force from Charleston Harbor. The state represented that the military occupation of a fortress within its domain by another sovereign power was derogatory to the dignity and independence of the state. It courteously offered adequate compensation to the United States for any property that might be involved in the change but politely insisted that the United States Government should cease to trespass upon the dignity of a sister nation.
To all this the Buchanan administration with equal courtesy replied, declining to recognize in South Carolina the status it claimed as an independent state, but seemingly at least promising the early evacuation of Fort Sumter.
All this was "play for position" on both sides and it produced the desired effect. It put South Carolina and the seceding states "right upon the record." That is to say, it enabled them to avoid even the appearance of recognizing the existence of Federal authority within their borders and on the other hand it gave to the more or less friendly administration of Mr. Buchanan the opportunity it desired to finish its term without armed conflict and without the necessity of assuming any positive and pronounced attitude toward secession.
But even after Mr. Lincoln came into office the clash of arms was postponed. Neither side was as yet ready for it, and each earnestly desired to throw upon the other the responsibility of precipitating a conflict which was clearly inevitable and for which each must account as best it could to that "opinion of mankind" to which the American Declaration of Independence had been reverently addressed as an act of "decent respect."
So for forty days or so after Mr. Lincoln assumed office there was nothing done, except in the way of preparation for emergencies. In the meanwhile Virginia still held aloof from the secession movement and five other border states – the chief sources of that military strength which resides in a food supply – were waiting for the word from the mother state.
It began to be understood in South Carolina that something must be done to compel Virginia to take her stand one way or the other. There was little if any doubt that upon the abstract right of any state to secede, Virginia stood firmly with the South. But her protest was resolute against the contention that secession was at that time either necessary or politic. It was necessary, therefore, to "force Virginia's hand," as whist players say, to do something which might leave to that state no choice but that between secession on her own part and consent, on the other hand, to the doctrine that the National Government was possessed of a right to coerce, and by military force to subdue, states that had assumed to act upon what they claimed to be and what Virginia freely recognized as the right of each state to withdraw from the Union at its own good pleasure. It was plain that the war must be hurried into being if the new Confederacy, composed exclusively of the cotton states, was to ally Virginia and the other food-producing states of the South with itself and thus secure any hope or even any chance of success in its effort to maintain itself.
Accordingly General Beauregard, who was in command at Charleston, was ordered to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter, and upon refusal to reduce that work. This was a ridiculously easy task. But its execution was a thing of momentous consequence.
Major Anderson, who commanded the fort with its mere handful of men, was himself a man of Southern extraction, as were Farragut, George H. Thomas, Winfield Scott and even Lincoln himself. But Anderson was a soldier in the United States Army and while he freely declared that his heart was not in a war against the South, he had no thought of failing in his soldierly duty.
When on the eleventh of April, 1861, he was summoned to surrender, he refused, as it became a brave officer to do. He knew perfectly well that Beauregard had force enough and cannon enough and ammunition enough to reduce a dozen such forts as that which he commanded, but in that spirit which throughout the war animated every good soldier of whatever rank in both armies, he refused to yield until such time as physical force should overcome his powers of resistance and compel his surrender. There was a relieving fleet in the offing, but, though it drew near enough during the action for Major Anderson to salute it, it rendered him no assistance and indeed made no attempt to do so.
Beauregard opened fire upon the fort at 4:20 A.M. on the twelfth of April, from batteries located at every available range point. The unfitness of the antiquated masonry work to endure a bombardment was quickly and, to Major Anderson, disastrously demonstrated, but in spite of all he heroically held out until on the next day his men were literally driven from their guns by the smoke of the burning quarters within the fortification. Unable to make further resistance and obviously hopeless of assistance even from that fleet in the offing which had been elaborately equipped and sent to effect his reinforcement and rescue, he at last capitulated.
He was permitted to salute his flag before lowering it, to march his command out of the fort with military honors, and to sail North with his men.
Those were the mild-mannered, courteous, drawing-room days of war. The butchery and brutality were to come later. Nobody had been killed by the fire of either side, and nobody wounded. The courtesy which had marked all relations between Major Anderson and the Carolinians was maintained to the end. Major Anderson left Charleston as any honored guest might have left a hospitable mansion in Charleston Neck after entertainment, with the good wishes, the friendship, and the godspeed of his hosts. Nothing could have been pleasanter or more exquisitely courteous than this encounter and this parting. But it was the preface to a war which sent brave men by scores of thousands to their graves, desolated thousands of homes, North and South, made widows of loving wives and orphans of unoffending children.
So far as the direct effect of the spectacular but bloodless bombardment of Fort Sumter was concerned it failed of its purpose. Even such an event did not prompt the Virginia convention, as had been hoped and confidently anticipated, to adopt an ordinance of secession. On the day after news of it was received in Richmond the representatives of the mother state stood as resolutely as ever in opposition to a secession program, which they deemed at once impolitic and unjustified by anything in the situation of affairs.
But the bombardment accomplished its intended effect by indirection. It gave Mr. Lincoln occasion to call for a volunteer army with which to meet what had thus assumed the character of a war upon the United States. As has been already related he called for seventy-five thousand men and demanded of Virginia that she should furnish her proportional part of that force. After many weeks of resolute resistance to what the Virginians regarded as a policy of quixotic folly and certain destruction, the Virginia convention on the seventeenth of April, 1861, adopted an ordinance of secession. From that hour war was on in earnest, as both sides quite clearly understood.
