Laurence Keitt, whose brother was killed by slaves, and who in 1858 tried to choke a fellow congressman, a Republican, on the floor of the House during an acrimonious debate, and who resigned his own congressional seat to become a convention delegate, put it another way: “We have carried the body of this Union to its last resting place, and now we will drop the flag over its grave.”

  Observing the festivities, James L. Petigru, the staunch unionist, was said to quip, “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” His mood, however, was somber. “I have seen the last happy day of my life,” he told a friend.

  Nonetheless, Petigru voted for secession. He agreed with a friend’s assessment that the state was “going to the devil,” but in accord with honor and loyalty to home, two of the most powerful forces in the South, he felt compelled to go with it.

  * * *

  —

  The cacophony continued well into the night with firecrackers, rockets, and gunfire. Ruffin retired to his room, glad to have secured one of the signatories’ pens as a memento. “As I now write, after 10 p.m., I hear the distant sounds of rejoicing, with music of a military band, as if there was no thought of ceasing.” But now, he noted, the convention had to address such “troublesome incidental questions” as how to take over the operations of the U.S. Post Office and the customs house so that there was no interruption in either service. Some advocated letting federal officers continue running these operations until otherwise directed, Ruffin noted, but many others objected on grounds that doing so would constitute submission to Northern tyranny. But these were details for others to resolve. The great task had been completed. It was time for Ruffin to move on. Florida, he knew, was about to convene its own secession convention, and he wanted to be present for that as well.

  * * *

  —

  While South Carolina was busy declaring its independence, Mary Chesnut visited a large rice plantation, Combahee, owned by the husband of one of her cousins. It was situated along a short “blackwater” river of the same name in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, near Beaufort, which was ideal for rice cultivation and, incidentally, for breeding mosquitoes in the sickly season. It was, Mary wrote, “a most beautiful country seat. Live oaks in all their glory, Camelias as plentiful on the lawn as the Hawthorn in an English hedge.”

  She and her hosts followed the news closely, or at least as closely as one could with mail and newspapers from Charleston first having to travel forty miles south over soggy terrain zebraed by rivers—the Wadmalaw, Ashepoo, and Edisto—and innumerable creeks, among them the Lower Toogoodoo. Another guest, Sabina Lowndes, also married to a prominent Combahee River planter, was present when news reached the house that the secession ordinance had passed.

  “We sat staring in each other’s faces,” Mary wrote.

  Sabina quoted the Old Testament book Deuteronomy, “As our days so shall our strength be.”

  Mary seemed to glimpse what lay ahead. She wrote, “I am truly glad I have seen those lovely Combahee places—they are so exposed they will doubtless suffer from invasion.”

  * * *

  —

  From the parapets of Fort Moultrie, Major Anderson and his men saw fireworks light the sky above Charleston and heard the booming of cannon. At the fort there was only darkness and cold, and the certainty that now things must surely reach a climax. Nothing lay ahead that seemed likely to cool Carolina’s passions. In two months, barring some unexpected event, Congress would certify Lincoln’s election.

  Lincoln

  Frustration

  December 20–24

  In Washington that night, a Navy lieutenant named David Dixon Porter, soon to become a focus of national attention, set out to learn what he could about the day’s events. On the way downtown, he passed the home of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, a leased twenty-three-room mansion at Eighteenth and G streets near the White House, and decided to stop in. The house was brightly lit and a party seemed to be underway.

  Porter, forty-seven, came from a prominent naval family and was wholly loyal to the Union but made a point of building friendships with leading men in Washington from both camps “to ascertain if there was any prospect of a peaceful termination of the difficulties between the North and South.” He had close connections within the city’s Southern delegations—too close, in the appraisal of some Navy officials. He was particularly friendly with the Davises. He was also a man of intense ambition, “given to intrigues,” according to his future boss, Gideon Welles, soon to be Lincoln’s pick for secretary of the Navy. Porter liked Davis, whom he called “a distinguished Southern gentleman,” but especially admired his wife, “a magnificent woman.” As a friend of the family’s, it was not surprising that Porter would appear at the party.

  “As I approached the front door I met Mrs. Davis coming hastily down the steps wrapped in a cloak, and there was loud and boisterous talking in the parlor,” he wrote. She seemed very excited; as soon as she saw him, she exclaimed, “Oh Captain I am so glad to see you, I want you to walk with me to the President’s.” Meaning, of course, the White House, which in this time was open to any visitor who chose to stop by. “There is glorious news,” she continued, “we have just heard that South Carolina has seceded, and I wish to go right to the President’s.”

  Apparently she was so convinced that Buchanan secretly favored secession that she believed he would be in a celebratory mood. Gauging the distance too far for her to walk, Porter found a “hack,” or hackney carriage, and drove her to the White House. Along the way Varina gushed about her delight at South Carolina’s secession. Porter felt otherwise, he told her, but she brushed this away. She offered to make him an admiral in the new secessionist navy. “You will join us,” she said; “we are going to have a glorious monarchy.”

  “And be made Duke of Benedict Arnold?” he countered. Porter doubted any such regime could succeed but kept his skepticism to himself. “In my mind’s eye, however, I could see a number of dirty little republics, tearing each other’s vitals out, and following in the footsteps of our republican sister, Mexico.”

  He left Varina at the White House door, not wishing to “witness the congratulations she said she was going to offer Mr. Buchanan.” Porter drove back to the Davises’ house intending to return the carriage and then go home, but, “anxious still to find a peg on which to hang a hope,” he went back into the parlor. “There I witnessed a scene I shall never forget.”

  * * *

  —

  A dozen men, apparently Davis’s Mississippi constituents, were in the room, “some of them having evidently dined out”—Porter’s oblique way of saying they had been drinking. “They were vociferating and congratulating each other in the most frantic manner,” he wrote. “Mr. Davis was the only calm man present, and there was a quiet look of pleasure beaming on his countenance, which plainly showed that the news from South Carolina was very acceptable to him.”

  All in the room save Porter seemed to think the secession of South Carolina was the best thing that had ever happened—“that anyone ought to be too happy to be allowed to share in that rich adventure.” But it struck him that the “wild excitement” in the room was overheated. “I thought the men before me somewhat fuddled with wine, and trusted that a good night’s sleep would bring them to their senses.” He felt deep disappointment that Davis, a man he respected, would endorse Carolina’s rebellion, “but then I imagined that he might have been drinking an extra glass and was humoring those madcaps.”

  At length the party decided to follow Varina and go to the White House. Porter did not join them. “This fraternizing with rebels by the President of the United States struck me at the time as very singular,” he wrote. “I could not understand how a man who had sworn to uphold the Constitution, and maintain the laws of the country could, at such a time as that, be receiving the felicitations of a rebel cause…yet so it was, and there they all went, drunk and sober, to call upon James Buchanan at eleven o’clock at night, when he should have been in session with his cabinet, calling out his armies and manning the Navy, to put a stop to the further progress of the rebellion.”

  Given Buchanan’s antipathy toward turmoil in these last months of his presidency, it is hard to imagine his receiving the Davis crowd with open arms, but as to this, the historical record is silent.

  * * *

  —

  In New York that Saturday, December 22, Horace Greeley, whose earlier editorial proposed that the South should be allowed to “go in peace,” wrote a letter to Lincoln in which he now deployed a markedly more bellicose tone. He recruited a surrogate scribe to copy the letter to ensure that Lincoln could actually read it—Greeley’s penmanship left recipients of his letters universally flummoxed, as he confessed to Lincoln in a postscript. “So many people entertain a violent prejudice against my handwriting that I have had the above copied to save you trouble in deciphering it.”

  If enough states wanted to exit the Union all at once—“seven or eight contiguous States (not one small one)”—they should be allowed to go, he told Lincoln. But, he cautioned, “if the seceding State or States go to fighting and defying the laws—the Union being yet undissolved, save by their own say-so—I guess they will have to be made to behave themselves. I am sorry for this, for I would much sooner have them behave of their own accord; but if they won’t, it must be fixed the other way.”

  Above all, Greeley wanted to avoid resorting yet again to compromise, with the result that the slave states would always be able to use the threat of secession to get their way. “I fear nothing, care for nothing, but another disgraceful back-down of the Free States,” he told Lincoln. “That is the only real danger. Let the Union slide—it may be reconstructed; let Presidents be assassinated—we can elect more; let the Republicans be defeated and crushed—we shall rise again; but another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads, and this nation becomes a second edition of the Barbary States as they were sixty years ago.”

  Greeley, who hitherto had downplayed the threat of Southern unrest, now acknowledged its severity. “The Cotton States are going,” he told Lincoln. “Nothing that we can offer will stop them. The Union-loving men are cowed and speechless; a Reign of Terror prevails from Cape Fear to the Rio Grande. Every suggestion of reason is drowned in a mad whirl of passion and faction. You will be President over no foot of the Cotton States not commanded by Federal Arms. Even your life is not safe, and it is your simple duty to be very careful of exposing it.” He cautioned Lincoln about traveling to Washington for his inauguration and warned “it is not yet certain that the Federal District will not be in the hands of a Pro-Slavery rebel array before the 4th of March.”

  Unlike Buchanan, the president-elect wanted to act but could not. He declined to speak in public about the secession crisis for fear of further alienating not just the South but also the North, where the clamor for a more aggressive campaign to end slavery was mounting. Ever the lawyer, Lincoln was acutely aware that he wasn’t even truly the president yet. The certification of electoral votes and his inauguration had yet to occur, and a rising swell of rumor warned that these might be disrupted, possibly by an invading force of Southern militia.

  With secession now a reality, the risk of armed conflict grew. Lincoln received a letter from Rep. Elihu Washburne, an ally from Illinois, summarizing a conversation he’d had with Gen. Winfield Scott, America’s aging and very large commanding general—three hundred pounds, six-four, some accounts say six-five—in which the general raised concerns about the vulnerability of forts Moultrie and Sumter in Charleston Harbor if Southern forces chose to attack. Legendary for his valor in the Mexican War, Scott still drew public reverence, but among officials who dealt with him in person he had come to seem less and less effective as a commander. He was seventy-four years old and often ill, periodically left prostrate by stomach problems and gout. Visitors would find him sitting with his feet bathed in a tub of ice. Navy lieutenant Porter, who had fought with Scott in 1847 during the Siege of Vera Cruz, found that age had seriously diminished his competence. “Fifteen years and the gout together had not improved his abilities or his temper and paying him a visit was very much like calling on a sick bear.”

  Still, General Scott understood war and military strategy. In Scott’s view, Moultrie, which was manned only by a small detachment of U.S. soldiers, would be next to impossible to defend. The same held for Sumter, which didn’t even have a garrison of soldiers, only a crew of laborers. Scott told Washburne that both forts should be reinforced.

  After reading Washburne’s summary, Lincoln on December 21 asked the congressman to pay a return visit to General Scott “and tell him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at, and after the inaugeration.” The correct spelling of the word consistently eluded Lincoln.

  Over the next few days Lincoln heard speculation that Buchanan might simply surrender the forts to keep the peace. “I can scarcely believe this,” he wrote to Senator Trumbull, his man in Washington, on Christmas Eve, “but if it prove true, I will, if our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inaugeration.” Signaling his continued faith that a potent pro-Union vanguard existed in the South, Lincoln added that this “would give the Union men a rallying cry.”

  For the time being, however, faith was about all that Lincoln possessed. “The political horizon looks dark and lowering,” he wrote to Peter H. Silvester, a New York lawyer and former congressman, “but the people, under Providence, will set all right.”

  Inwardly, Lincoln’s frustration was mounting, occasionally bursting forth in remarks both stark and direct. In an offhand comment to private-secretary Nicolay, Lincoln said that if it was true that Buchanan planned to surrender the Charleston forts, “they ought to hang him.”

  Charleston

  The Major Gets an Idea

  December 22–24

  The officer who led the work of physically buttressing the forts in Charleston Harbor was Capt. John G. Foster of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who operated more or less independently of Major Anderson and reported directly to the commander of the Corps in Washington. He was thirty-seven years old with a mutton-chop beard and a slight limp caused by a wound in the Mexican War.

  Upon arriving in Charleston in the summer of 1860, Foster had begun recruiting civilian workers both to complete the construction of Fort Sumter and to reinforce Moultrie; he hired stonemasons from as far north as Baltimore. In December, his workers at Moultrie began digging a “wet ditch” fifteen feet wide around the fort. He would have preferred a deep moat filled with water, but soil conditions prohibited the necessary excavation. Instead, the men created a ditch whose bottom consisted of what Foster described as quicksand, an effective obstacle to advancing troops because it was “very yielding to pressure, like a quagmire.” The workers also began erecting a picket fence along the edge of the ditch and installed new structures on the fort’s walls to better defend it against infantry attack. In a letter to Washington on December 13 he projected that all the work—except the picket fence—would be completed within four days. He also proposed to run submerged wires from a powerful Daniell electric battery (commonly used in telegraph systems) at Moultrie to the main powder magazine at Fort Sumter, thereby allowing Major Anderson to blow up the latter should it be occupied by secessionist forces.

  Foster also wanted muskets to arm his engineering force. From his perspective, the need to equip the men with small arms was obvious and beyond debate. Quietly, he requisitioned forty muskets from Charleston’s federal arsenal. Ordinarily this would have been the most routine of acts; now it threatened to spark war, in large part because the commander of the arsenal, Col. Benjamin Huger, a Charlestonian appointed by War Secretary Floyd, had taken it upon himself to promise South Carolina’s governor that no weapons would be removed.

  The matter quickly ascended the Army’s hierarchy. At two a.m. on Thursday, December 20, a telegram arrived for Captain Foster from Floyd, who told him he had just learned about the forty muskets. “If you have removed any arms,” Floyd wrote, “return them instantly.”

  Foster complied, though given the rising threat of conflict between federal troops and Carolina forces, he believed that doing so was “almost suicidal.”

  * * *

  —

  On Sunday, December 23, a messenger arrived at Fort Moultrie from the War Department bearing a letter written by Secretary Floyd for delivery directly to Anderson.

  By now the war secretary had become a deeply controversial figure and an embarrassment to President Buchanan, which was saying something, since the administration itself was widely considered to be an embarrassment. Floyd was deemed by many to be a paragon of corruption, and a traitor to boot. He had become embroiled in a financial scandal dating to 1858 that resulted in $870,000 in federal funds—equivalent to over thirty-two million in twenty-first-century dollars—being looted from the U.S. Treasury and the Department of Interior.

  On the same day that Floyd had issued his order to Captain Foster to return the muskets, Floyd ordered the federal arsenal at Pittsburgh to ship 124 cannon, including 113 of the largest guns in service, to two outlying federal forts in the South, one on a remote barrier island off the coast of Mississippi, the other at Galveston, Texas. Given his Virginia roots, this immediately struck his critics as fishy. Neither fort was fully manned; neither was complete enough to receive such weapons. The order seemed like a gift to the South, especially coming as it did on the day that South Carolina exited the Union. If Mississippi and Texas seized the forts, they would receive a windfall of formerly federal weaponry. Loyal citizens in Pittsburgh protested and stopped the transfers.