* * *

  —

  It convened on Thursday, December 27, with new men filling the posts left by the resignations of Howell Cobb and Lewis Cass. The men who comprised the new cabinet were Jeremiah S. Black, formerly Buchanan’s attorney general, now replacing Cass as secretary of state; Edwin M. Stanton, an assistant attorney general who now stepped into his former boss’s seat as attorney general; Philip F. Thomas, replacing Cobb at Treasury (he would last all of a month); Joseph Holt, postmaster; Isaac Toucey, secretary of the Navy; Floyd, war secretary; and Jacob Thompson, Interior. A former congressman from Mississippi, Thompson favored secession and cast himself rather openly in the role of court spy on behalf of South Carolina. By now the news of Anderson’s move had been confirmed.

  That War Secretary Floyd even dared to attend the meeting was a surprise, given that a few days earlier Buchanan, through an intermediary, had asked him to resign. But not only did Floyd dare—he behaved with an aggravating hauteur. He read aloud a three-paragraph statement that began: “It is evident now, from the action of the commander of Fort Moultrie, that the solemn pledges of the Government have been violated by Major Anderson.” Having lost the confidence of South Carolina, he read, “one remedy only is left, and it is to withdraw the garrison from the harbor of Charleston altogether. I hope that the President will allow me to make that order at once. This order, in my judgment, can alone prevent bloodshed and civil war.”

  Secretary of State Black forcefully disagreed and declared his own support for Anderson’s occupation of Sumter. A former Supreme Court justice whose most salient physical features were eyebrows that resembled cumulonimbus clouds, he was often referred to as Judge Black. “Good,” Black said of Anderson’s move. “I am glad of it. It is in precise accordance with his orders.”

  “It is not,” Floyd said.

  “But it is,” Black countered. “I recollect the orders distinctly word for word.” The written original of these orders—the “last extremity” directive delivered verbally to Anderson by Buell but issued first in writing by Floyd himself—was then retrieved; it explicitly refuted Floyd’s charge.

  During this session, Interior Secretary Thompson likewise proposed that Sumter be evacuated, but as a gesture of generosity to South Carolina. The state, he argued, was a small one, “with a sparse white population,” while the Union was large and powerful. “We could afford to say to South Carolina, ‘See, we will withdraw our garrison as an evidence that we mean you no harm.’ ”

  At this, Stanton, the new attorney general and a staunch unionist, turned to Buchanan. “Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the Government is strong, and that we, as the public servants, have the confidence of the people.” Nothing was further from the truth, Stanton later recalled saying. “No administration has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this has done.” With Floyd still present, Stanton went on to allude to Floyd’s financial scandal. “Now it is proposed to give up Sumter. All I have to say is, that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week.”

  Floyd said nothing.

  This proved to be Floyd’s last cabinet meeting. With his dismissal by Buchanan still not disclosed, Floyd now saw a way to craft his exit as a decision of his own, in high moral terms, to restore his reputation among the public—or at least that portion of the public living below the Mason-Dixon Line. He raised anew Buchanan’s alleged pledge to maintain the military status quo in Charleston Harbor and charged that in now breaking that pledge, Buchanan had engaged in an act of dishonor that Floyd (overlooking for the moment his own scandal) could not abide.

  “Our refusal or even our delay to place affairs back as they stood under our agreement, invites a collision and must inevitably inaugurate civil war,” Floyd wrote in his formal letter of resignation on Saturday, December 29. “I cannot consent to be the agent of such a calamity. I deeply regret to feel myself under the necessity of tendering to you my resignation as Secretary of War, because I can no longer hold the office under my convictions of patriotism, nor with honor, subjected, as I am, to a violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.”

  In a one-paragraph reply two days later, Buchanan accepted Floyd’s resignation and told him he had appointed Postmaster Holt, a strong unionist, as his provisional replacement.

  * * *

  —

  At one point while the cabinet was in session, Sen. Robert Toombs of Georgia came to the White House and asked to see Buchanan, who stepped out to meet with him in an adjacent room. Toombs told him that he had received inquiries from several leading citizens of Savannah as to whether Anderson would continue to occupy the fort, and whether the United States intended to retain possession. It was this meeting, according to William Trescot, that first brought home to Buchanan the true magnitude of what was occurring in the South—“the first time he seemed really to begin to believe in what was so near at hand.” Until then, Buchanan “thought it likely that South Carolina would secede but that she would not be supported by any other state.”

  Buchanan told Toombs he had not yet decided how to proceed with regard to Sumter. “The Cabinet is now in session upon that very subject.”

  “I thank you Sir for the information that is all I wanted to know,” Toombs said, and prepared to exit.

  “But Mr. Toombs, why do you ask?”

  “Because Sir my State has a deep interest in the decision.”

  This perplexed Buchanan. “How your state—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbor is abandoned?”

  “Sir,” Toombs answered, “the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.”

  “Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?”

  “Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”

  * * *

  —

  Pressure on Buchanan was mounting, and not just from the South. Anderson’s move galvanized the North, where his lone and courageous act was all the more striking when juxtaposed against the behavior of an administration whose salient feature was inaction. The major became an immediate hero. One admirer called him America’s “one true man.” The legislature of the Nebraska Territory unanimously passed a resolution of thanks to Anderson and wished him a happy New Year. Requests for autographs poured in from Boston; New York; St. Louis; Philadelphia; Chicago; and Batavia, New York. One even came from a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, who explained that while he sided with the South, he nonetheless approved of Anderson’s move for the sake of the Union. A publisher, Rudd and Carleton, asked Anderson and his officers to keep notes on their experiences following the move to Sumter for a later book, to be called tentatively, and optimistically, “ ‘A Month’ or ‘Two Months at Fort Sumter.’ ” The book, they said, “would sell like wild-fire.”

  Buchanan recognized that the rising outcry from the North proscribed his range of options and made his own peaceful exit less and less likely. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter,” he said, “I can travel home to Wheatland by the light of my own burning effigies.”

  Charleston Harbor

  Turmoil

  December 27–31

  In Charleston on December 27, the day after Anderson occupied Sumter, South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens, newly elected, ordered the state militia to seize all remaining federal properties in Charleston Harbor. He did not necessarily have the power to do so, since the governorship of South Carolina was mainly ceremonial, but he did it anyway, even overriding the objections of the state legislature.

  First to fall was Castle Pinckney, situated on a small, uninhabited island called Shutes Folly less than a mile from the Charleston waterfront. At around four p.m., some 150 state militia crossed to the fort aboard the patrol steamer Nina, then stormed ashore bearing long ladders to scale the walls. First, however, they tried to enter through the fort’s main entrance. Not surprisingly the gate was locked. They deployed the ladders. A dozen or so men clamored up and over the walls, and upon descending to the fort’s interior found its grounds all but empty, occupied only by a lieutenant, an ordnance sergeant and his family, and a dozen or so workmen. They promptly raised the palmetto flag. An officer of the invading militia found Kate Skillen, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the ordnance sergeant, weeping as if bereft and told her not to worry, they would not harm her.

  “I am not crying because I am afraid!” she sneered through her tears (this according to Captain Doubleday’s account).

  “What is the matter, then?” the officer asked.

  She pointed to the palmetto flag. “I am crying because you have put that miserable rag up there.”

  From Sumter’s parapets, Anderson’s men watched this adventure with amusement, despite the obvious gravity of the moment. Pvt. John Thompson, in his letter to his father in Northern Ireland, offered a wry commentary: “They can scale the walls of an unoccupied Fort with a gallantry highly commendable. In fact their martial ardor seemed to have taken a turn in this direction for the same day they assaulted the remaining empty Fort in the harbor and amid shouts exultantly raised their Palmetto flag, to announce their bloodless victory.”

  The second fort was the now vacant Moultrie, which the militia seized that evening, again with no resistance. Also that day, a force of Carolina militia seized Charleston’s federal arsenal just as Captain Foster of the engineers ventured into the city to withdraw money to pay the laborers he had discharged. “There I found the greatest excitement to exist,” he wrote to a Baltimore friend, John H. B. Latrobe, “and although I saw nothing to warrant apprehensions of personal violence, yet I was informed by many friends to leave the city, because it was generally believed that I had come to blow up the arsenal. Before I left I had the satisfaction of seeing two companies in quick march to seize and protect the arsenal from my incendiary presence.”

  * * *

  —

  With Christmas behind her, Mary Chesnut left her friends’ plantation on the Combahee River and returned to Charleston, where she was reunited with her husband, James, still serving as a delegate to the secession convention. They stayed at a well-appointed boarding house at 43 Church Street managed by Mrs. P. R. Gidiere about four blocks south of Ryan’s Mart, the city’s thriving slave market. In Charleston at this time, as in many locales, boarding houses were a popular form of accommodation for visiting planters and yeomen alike.

  On Thursday morning, December 27, Mrs. Gidiere returned from market and announced Anderson’s move into Sumter. “Very few understood the consequences of that quiet move of Major Anderson—at first it was looked on as a misfortune,” Mary wrote in her diary. But it prompted other states to move quickly to seize federal properties within their boundaries, and in so doing to accelerate their own drive for secession. This all felt familiar to Mary. She had grown up in a household that embraced and promoted states’ rights. Her father had been governor of South Carolina during John C. Calhoun’s nullification campaign and wholly supported it. “So I was of necessity a rebel born,” Mary wrote.

  Still, she wasn’t at all sure that South Carolina’s leaders were up to the job of managing the state’s exit. She bemoaned the kind of men now in charge: “Invariably some sleeping dead head long forgotten or passed over. Young and active spirits ignored. Places for worn out politicians seemed the rule—when our only hope is—to use all the talents God has given us.”

  She described Governor Pickens as “a great old horse fly buzzing and fuming and fretting.”

  * * *

  —

  Anderson’s move enraged the Carolina commissioners in Washington, who saw it as a complete betrayal of Buchanan’s pledge not to alter the military status quo in Charleston. By now that murky pledge might as well have been engraved in marble. Their honor bruised, their hubris abruptly deflated, the commissioners composed a peevish note to the president. In prose that dripped presumption, they told Buchanan that they had initially planned to negotiate “with the earnest desire to avoid all unnecessary and hostile collision, and so to inaugurate our new relations as to secure mutual respect, general advantage, and a future of good will and harmony, beneficial to all the parties concerned. But the events of the last twenty-four hours render such an assurance impossible.”

  They demanded that Buchanan immediately withdraw all federal forces from Charleston Harbor. “Under present circumstances they are a standing menace which renders negotiation impossible, and, as our recent experience shows, threatens speedily to bring to a bloody issue questions which ought to be settled with temperance and judgment.”

  With the help of Secretary of State Black and Attorney General Stanton, Buchanan drafted a reply. He told the commissioners that upon learning of Anderson’s move, “my first promptings were to command him to return to his former position.” But then he learned that state authorities, “without waiting or asking for an explanation,” had acted within hours to seize the other forts.

  Evacuation of Sumter was therefore no longer possible, Buchanan wrote, for the simple reason that there was no place left to evacuate to. “In the harbor of Charleston we now find three forts confronting each other, over all of which the Federal flag floated only four days ago; but now over two of them this flag has been supplanted, and the palmetto flag has been substituted in its stead. It is under all these circumstances that I am urged to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that without this, negotiation is impossible.”

  With a surprising display of backbone, the president declared: “This I cannot do; this I will not do.”

  It was now clear to the commissioners that there would be no meeting with Buchanan. The next day, New Year’s Day 1861, the commissioners launched their final retort, laced with frustration and hurt feelings. These men were, after all, the most upstanding of the South Carolina chivalry, accustomed to having their way with slaves and yeomen alike.

  They charged that Anderson, in moving to Sumter, had “waged war.” The state, in seizing Moultrie and the other federal holdings, had merely acted in “simple self-defense.” They closed their letter with a mighty wag of fingers. “By your course,” they wrote, “you have probably rendered civil war inevitable. Be it so.”

  Buchanan refused to take delivery, according to the official U.S. record: “This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it.”

  Fort Sumter

  Ominous Doings

  December 28–31

  Beyond Sumter’s walls, there were menacing signs that South Carolina was preparing for outright war. Governor Pickens urged planters to establish their own gun batteries along the Santee River, the second-largest river on the nation’s East Coast, and also on the shores of Winyah Bay, fifty miles north, which afforded access to the port city of Georgetown. Pickens sought to rally the planters with an allusion to the role their forebears played in winning the Revolutionary War: “I doubt not that the same Patriotism which characterized your Sires burns as strongly in your Breasts now.”

  On December 28 Pickens banned all shipments of arms and supplies to Fort Sumter (he permitted mail service), claiming the ban was meant “to prevent irregular collisions, and to spare the unnecessary effusion of blood.” But Anderson’s lookouts saw signs that Carolina forces were establishing new outposts on nearby islands. On New Year’s Eve, steamers deposited eighty soldiers, draught horses, and an array of construction equipment on Morris Island, just south of Sumter. To Anderson it was obvious that the state planned to erect new artillery batteries in easy range of the fort.

  Anderson was perplexed by Governor Pickens’s bellicosity; it seemed foolhardy. “He knows not how entirely the city of Charleston is in my power,” Anderson wrote in a letter to Adjutant Cooper on January 1. “I can cut his communication off from the sea, and thereby prevent the reception of supplies, and close the harbor, even at night, by destroying the light-houses.” He added: “These things, of course, I would never do, unless compelled to do so in self-defense.”

  Anderson was perversely pleased to learn that South Carolina military officials, during a meeting, had unanimously praised his move to Sumter as “one of consummate wisdom; that it was the best one that could have been made.” He told Cooper: “I must confess that I feel highly complimented by the expression of such an opinion (from those most deeply affected by it) of the change of position I felt bound to take to save my command and to prevent the shedding of blood. In a few days I hope, God willing, that I shall be so strong here that they will hardly be foolish enough to attack me.”

  Although former war secretary Floyd had not approved of Anderson’s move, many others in the U.S. Army had, including America’s top general, Winfield Scott, who communicated his praise through an intermediary. For the moment, however, the general’s powers were at a decidedly low ebb. As the nation spiraled into its gravest domestic crisis ever, its senior-most military commander, its general-in-chief, was suffering extravagantly from a several-day siege of diarrhea that had robbed his nights of sleep and left him exhausted and more or less incapacitated. On Sunday, December 30, however, the general managed to rouse himself enough to compose a secret message to President Buchanan with his recommendation for how to support Major Anderson and his garrison. As always in his formal communiqués, General Scott referred to himself in the third person.

  “It is Sunday,” Scott wrote. “The weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal, he hopes for the President’s forgiveness.