Seymour had thought deeply on the subject of making Moultrie more resistant to attack. He suggested that the Carolinians might attempt a ruse by setting fire to a building outside the fort, “and while our attention is drawn off, the rush is made from any point where assailants are hidden.”

  But he also reminded Anderson that in the coming battle the garrison’s honor would be at stake. “The country will be ashamed of us and of our science if every possible precaution is not taken to defeat an attack by surprise,” he wrote, then warned: “There’s no time left us.”

  Another of Moultrie’s officers likewise believed that a “collision” was inevitable. Samuel Wylie Crawford, thirty-one, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, was technically an assistant surgeon, but for the time being, with his superior away on leave, he was the Army’s sole doctor in Charleston. He had been at Moultrie only since September, but in that time, especially after Lincoln’s election, he had seen the populace around him grow ever more resentful and belligerent. In a letter to his brother, A. J. Crawford, he wrote, “If you have yet any ideas of further compromise, or that these people will take one step backward, I beg you to relinquish them.”

  He forecast that South Carolina would secede and immediately demand possession of Moultrie, Fort Sumter, and the other federal properties in Charleston.

  “Let me assure you,” he continued, “that this State is in revolution. I never saw before such unanimity and I never in my life believed that such hatred could be exhibited to the Union.” Even children were caught up in the secessionist fervor, Crawford wrote; if anything, the women were more ardent than the men. “The time for argument my dear brother is past and past forever, and you and I have lived to see the saddest sight that will ever be witnessed by man. I never knew, I never felt how much I loved my country until now.”

  There would be no gentle disengagement, he warned. “We are preparing for war with these mad Carolinians.”

  * * *

  —

  On Tuesday, December 11, Major Anderson received a visitor at his Moultrie headquarters, Assistant Adjutant General Don Carlos Buell, whose name would soon become familiar—and at times decried—in both North and South. For now, however, Major Buell was serving as a messenger, dispatched from Washington in secret by Buchanan’s war secretary, John B. Floyd, to deliver verbally an overarching directive as to how Anderson should manage his garrison and the forts under his command as the crisis in South Carolina deepened—verbally because the telegraph and mails were deemed too permeable.

  The instructions were anything but precise; rather, they seemed to reflect Floyd’s own conflicting loyalties. “You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression,” Buell relayed, “and for that reason you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude. But you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity.”

  Floyd’s directive acknowledged that Anderson’s garrison was too small to effectively occupy and defend all three of the most important forts—Sumter, Moultrie, and Castle Pinckney—but authorized him that if any of them were attacked, he could then put his men into whichever fort “you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance.”

  Now came the obfuscating element. “You are also authorized,” Buell said, “to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.” Exactly what might constitute “tangible evidence” was left for Anderson to decide.

  Anderson warned Buell that in this increasingly antagonistic environment secrecy was impossible; the nature of his visit would be discovered. And indeed, the day before Buell’s arrival, the Washington correspondent for the Charleston Mercury had notified his editor that Major Buell and several other officers were on their way to Charleston. “They were sent for no good to us,” he wrote. “See that they make no change in the distribution of soldiers, so as to put them all in Fort Sumter. That would be dangerous to us.”

  The correspondent’s letter soon appeared in the Mercury as a brief news item, which Anderson then clipped and forwarded to Adj. Gen. Samuel Cooper in Washington, Buell’s superior, to show him “the almost impossibility of keeping anything secret.”

  For the moment, Anderson wrote, things were relatively calm. “I shall, of course, prepare here for the worst.”

  Ruffin

  To Dare

  December 17–20

  They convened on a murky, wet Monday in December 1860 in Columbia, which lay under a heavy fog. Here gathered 169 of South Carolina’s leading political figures, including five former congressmen, four former governors, and four former U.S. senators (among them the recently resigned James Chesnut), many accompanied by one or more enslaved servants to tend to their daily needs. All were men, all were members of Carolina’s social elite; all had significant wealth, with an average net worth of over one hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to $3.7 million in twenty-first-century dollars. The majority owned at least one slave; twenty-seven owned one hundred or more; one delegate owned more than five hundred. Forty percent were graduates of the same school, South Carolina College.

  They found the city electric with disunionist ardor but also tense and fearful owing to a force having nothing to do with politics.

  * * *

  —

  The convention began at noon, December 17, at the city’s First Baptist Church. The choice of Columbia had been a point of controversy. At first glance it made perfect sense, given that Columbia was the capital and located more or less in the middle of the state, but the delegates who favored secession, among them the fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, worried that Columbia might not only be central in terms of geography, but centrist also in attitude. Unionist sentiment in the state remained strong, with some prominent conservatives publicly opposed to secession, including James Petigru, seventy-one, a devoted unionist and former state attorney general revered for his principled behavior and his acerbic wit. A strong seam of conservatism ran through the ranks of the delegates selected for the convention, many of whom lobbied to have it convene later, in mid-January or early February, in hopes that the passions raised by Lincoln’s election would by then have cooled. A public meeting in Spartanburg issued a declaration: “Resolved, That according to our opinion S.C. is now acting rather hastily; that the Convention was called prematurely.”

  The secessionists sensed that the mood in Columbia, unlike in radical Charleston, was uncertain. This became apparent early on, when, as their first order of business, the delegates elected a convention president. Many assumed that fire-eater Rhett would win the post; so did Rhett himself, who by now was famous throughout the nation as an apostle of secession with all the overheated passion of a John Brown, but not, so far at least, Brown’s predilection for murder. The delegates gave him only five votes out of a possible 169 and instead elected David Flavel Jamison—“General” Jamison—a planter from Orangeburg District, tellingly neither purely Upcountry nor Lowcountry, who was deemed to be a man of sturdy and deliberate demeanor. Rhett had long counted him as a friend, as did James Hammond. Jamison had stood by Hammond throughout the political and personal crises sparked by his dalliances with his nieces and his slaves.

  In a brief address accepting the presidency of the convention, Jamison first ran through a list of offenses committed by the North against the South, dating to the Missouri Compromise, but omitting any direct reference to the great fear that had really brought all these men here: that Lincoln might abolish slavery. Jamison discouraged the delegates from acting “from too great impatience” but also spurred them forth with a variation of the motto deployed by Georges-Jacques Danton at the start of the French Revolution: “To dare! and again to dare! and without end to dare!”

  The delegates were only willing to dare so much, however, as became evident when word passed among them that a minor outbreak of smallpox in Columbia seemed to be intensifying. On December 16, the day before the convention began, the state Board of Health had reported fourteen new cases. The radicals, fanning fears of a wider outbreak, urged adjournment to Charleston; the delegates agreed, in the process bruising Columbia’s pride. The state legislature also fled to Charleston.

  The delegates’ avid embrace of evacuation prompted accusations of cowardice and tarnished honor. One observer noted a peculiar irony, that the delegates “are prepared to face a world in arms, but they run away from the smallpox.” Another wrote, with poetic flare:

  Our brave secessionists have met, and

  Tarried but a day…

  Like children scared and terrified…

  They broke and ran away.

  The New York Tribune’s Columbia correspondent called the move a “cowardly stampede.”

  Smallpox, however, was a real and grim threat. Vaccination against it had by this time been available in America for half a century, and inoculation ever since the Revolutionary War, but the disease remained a scourge. The memory was still fresh in people’s minds of an outbreak in Charleston in 1853, also in December, when smallpox sickened sixty-four people and killed eleven of them. Concern had lingered into the following February, prompting one slave trader to urge his employer, a prominent Charleston broker named Ziba B. Oakes, to “please have my negroes vaxinated on arrival.”

  The secessionist crowd was thrilled with the move, convinced that once the convention arrived in Charleston, the supercharged radicalism of the city would help shape the outcome. Lest the change of venue somehow interrupt momentum, the radicals insisted that before the delegates left Columbia they had to pledge to endorse immediate secession the moment the convention reconvened in Charleston. The delegates approved the pledge by unanimous vote, then evacuated. Early the next morning, Tuesday, December 18, they and their spouses, children, and enslaved attendants clustered at the station to catch the four a.m. train to Charleston.

  * * *

  —

  The delegates gathered twelve hours later at Charleston’s Institute Hall, the largest such hall in the city, with capacity for three thousand people. Something about the place seemed to foster divisiveness. The proslavery Democratic Party had met there the previous April and blew apart, leaving a Northern and a Southern variant, virtually assuring Lincoln’s election—exactly the outcome that pro-secession radicals had hoped for in the belief that his election would cause every slave state to flee the Union.

  The convention delegates moved again the next day, Wednesday, December 19, this time to St. Andrews Hall, a smaller venue often used for banquets and balls, and for meetings of the South Carolina Jockey Club.

  It was at this point that Edmund Ruffin at last arrived, certain that his presence would help keep the delegates focused and inflamed. He was more resolute than ever. Another family tragedy, the death of his daughter Elizabeth, thirty-nine years old, in childbirth, had redoubled his drive for secession. Just four days after her funeral, he was packed and ready to begin the journey to South Carolina. He woke to find snow blanketing the landscape, with more snow falling. By nightfall nine inches lay on the ground, assuring that Ruffin would not reach Columbia in time for the start of the convention and threatening that he might even miss it entirely. He was not able to depart until two days later, when the convention was scheduled to begin. He fought his way south, enduring obstacle after obstacle, including an icebound steamboat and another derailed locomotive. He hoped to exert his influence to ensure speedy action by the delegates. Delay, he knew, was the enemy.

  He had left Richmond at four a.m. on Tuesday, about the time the South Carolina secession delegates were boarding the cars to make their escape. Ruffin’s train was bound for Columbia, but along the way he learned of the delegates’ evacuation and switched trains. At eight-thirty the next morning, Wednesday, he reached Charleston, where he was lucky to find a small unheated room at the Charleston Hotel.

  Convention president Jamison personally offered him a seat in the new hall, a particular honor because this building was so small, and so packed, that most people had to stand. Instantly recognizable, he was greeted with cheers and applause and renewed attention from the press. In his diary, he pasted a clipping from Frank Leslie’s Weekly that described him as “laden with years, and having the air of a patriarch” while promptly adding that he was by no means in a “doddering state,” nor was his body bent or his step slow. “On the left side of his hat he wears the ever present cockade,” the Weekly reported, “and so with this symbol of resistance hoisted at the peak, the old man goes from Convention to Convention, a political Peter the Hermit, preaching secession where ever he goes.”

  Nothing was perfect, however: Ruffin judged the accompanying portrait to be “a coarse and bad picture.” But it, too, wound up pasted into his diary.

  Ruffin was present as well the next day, Thursday, December 20, when, shortly before one p.m., the committee charged with writing the secession ordinance presented its handiwork to the convention for final approval. By now, thanks to heavy editing by Robert Barnwell Rhett meant to pare the wording down to its simplest elements and thus avoid the risk of further debate, the ordinance was a spare 137 words long. It concluded: “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

  One by one, in a voice vote, every delegate approved the measure. The process of disunion took eight minutes. “Such remarkable unanimity is unprecedented,” Ruffin noted in his diary. The New York Tribune’s Charleston correspondent found the moment an odd one. It seemed to him that the delegates were “startled rather than pleased at what they had done.”

  Having thus indeed dared, the delegates choreographed a signing ceremony meant to rival the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The convention adjourned at three forty-five, then reassembled at six-thirty that evening at St. Andrews Hall in order to march in procession back to Institute Hall—now “Secession Hall”—for the ceremony, set to begin at seven o’clock.

  The delegates were met at the base of the steps by the state’s leading legislators, wearing ceremonial robes, who then led the delegates up the steps and into the hall. President Jamison carried the sacred ordinance, which by now had been printed on a piece of linen parchment measuring roughly two feet by two feet, and embossed with the Great Seal of South Carolina (designed tellingly in 1776). As they entered the hall, a roar rose from the three thousand spectators who had crammed themselves within, a level of riotous cheer that in fact had been absent those eighty-four years earlier when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. According to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush, they did so then amid a “pensive and awful silence,” convinced they were signing “what was believed by many at the time to be our own death warrants.”

  There was no such dread evident at Secession Hall. This was now strictly a legal matter, a contract broken, a compact dissolved; no hard feelings; even that lofty oracle of public sentiment, Horace Greeley, had said, “Go in peace.”

  Once again Ruffin was honored with a seat on the Institute floor, at the heart of things. The delegates occupied the center of the chamber; members of the state legislature sat along the sides, the House on one flank, the Senate on the other.

  As each delegate’s name was called, he walked to the table on which the ordinance lay and signed his name. At either side stood a palmetto, the state tree, readily recognizable by its palm-like leaves and the spiky fronds that protruded from its trunk. The crowd cheered each man but saved its best for delegate Rhett, now just one day from turning sixty, who had fought for secession for three decades. As he walked to the table, the hall erupted with volcanic cheers and applause. He had been snubbed in the vote for convention president, yes, but this was his moment all the same, and by God, he would take advantage of it. The crowd rose, bursting with emotion; women waved white kerchiefs from the gallery. Men and women alike wept at the breast-swelling beauty of the moment: Here was Robert Barnwell Rhett, the almost old man, achieving his goal at last. Rhett made a show of it. He dropped to his knees, raised his hands over his head, bowed to the ground, and said a prayer.

  * * *

  —

  And how Edmund Ruffin, consigned to the audience, must have envied him; how this scene surely rekindled his own hurt at being ill-treated by his home state of Virginia. Ruffin’s diary, otherwise so detailed in its description of the day’s events, makes no reference to Rhett at all, or his display.

  * * *

  —

  At nine-fifteen p.m. it was over. Convention president Jamison declared the state an “independent commonwealth.” Spectators raced up to the palmettos and tore off the dagger-like fronds for keepsakes. As the delegates exited the hall, they were greeted by a tumult of celebration. On the city’s Battery, the guns of the East Bay Artillery disgorged smoke and noise as militias—among them the Vigilant Rifles, Zouaves, and Washington Light Infantry—marched and innumerable bands played. The bells of St. Michael’s Church pealed. Citizens wore blue cockades and lit bonfires in barrels of rosin. Fireworks exploded in the sky. The Charleston Mercury, owned and edited by Rhett’s son, was ready with a special “EXTRA” edition whose entire front page consisted of a reprint of the ordinance and a single headline in giant black letters: “The Union Is Dissolved!”