This did not please the emissaries. They knew that a Union naval expedition had been dispatched to Charleston. They knew it because Lincoln had told them. On April 6, a courier had set out from Washington for Charleston to deliver to the state’s governor, Francis W. Pickens, a succinct message: An expedition was on its way to supply the fort with provisions only and would make no attempt to transfer arms, ammunition, or troops unless the fort or the ships were attacked.

  It was, on Lincoln’s part, a clever gambit: He was sending food to starving men. Who could object? If the ships were allowed to deliver it unimpeded, peace would reign and Anderson and his men would have all the supplies they needed to continue holding the fort. If Confederate forces fired on the ships, however, they would in the world’s eyes be the offenders, engaging in an act of dishonor, the very thing the chivalry were schooled from childhood to avoid. The Northern fleet was prepared: It carried two hundred soldiers, guns, and ammunition and included several of the U.S. Navy’s most powerful warships.

  To the Carolina officers, Anderson seemed to be stalling; they feared that the fleet might actually be an expedition of war and that Anderson knew it. As General Beauregard noted later in a formal report, it was “an imperative necessity to reduce the fort as speedily as possible, and not to wait until the ships and the fort should unite in a combined attack upon us.”

  “Reduce” was a polite military way of saying “destroy.”

  The weather contributed to the Carolinians’ fears. The rain and deep darkness and the noise of wind and surf made ideal conditions for a covert passage through the harbor.

  The officers read Anderson’s response on the spot. Yes, he had given what they’d asked for, a precise evacuation date, but his qualification rendered it moot. One officer, Col. James Chesnut, Jr., among the chivalry’s most-favored sons, resplendent now in a brilliant red sash and sword, wrote out a reply.

  “Sir,” it read, “By authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard, commanding the provisional forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.” It was three-twenty a.m.

  Anderson accepted this without comment. There was no anger, just civility and courtesy. This was, after all, an affair of honor, and there was no more important thing to Anderson and to the Confederate officers than honor. Anderson walked them to the dock and shook hands with each. “If we never meet in this world again,” he told them, “God grant that we may in the next.”

  The officers departed. Their boat moved out over the black waters, the enslaved oarsmen again hard at work, but they did not steer toward Charleston. Instead, they rowed due west, toward James Island, twenty-three hundred yards away, where a battery of heavy mortars had been established in a colonial-era redoubt named Fort Johnson, once abandoned but now again ready for battle. The landscape around it lay newly barbed with cannon, mortars, and bombproof shelters, these installed by hundreds of captive workers whose labor was donated by their Charleston owners.

  The officers made their way to a mortar battery and ordered its commander to prepare to fire one round at precisely four-twenty a.m., this to signal that the bombardment of Sumter was to begin. In the liturgy of honor, such precision was important: A gentleman was punctual.

  * * *

  —

  At Sumter, Anderson ordered the garrison’s distinctive American flag raised over the fort, its thirty-three stars arrayed in a loose diamond pattern in the blue field at its top-left corner. The flag was immense: twenty feet high by thirty-six long. He dispatched his own officers to awaken their men and give them the news. Just the day before he had directed them all to move their bedding into the protective shelter of the casemates, the virtually bombproof first level of the fort.

  * * *

  —

  In Charleston that Thursday there was a wild dinner party, “the merriest, maddest dinner we have had yet,” wrote Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of the colonel then delivering the Confederate ultimatum. Dinner was an afternoon meal, generally around two or three o’clock; supper was in the evening.

  Mary described the party in a red leather-bound book laced with gold leaf and defended with a brass lock that housed her daily journal. She kept it very private now and locked the book nightly, but in time it would become one of the most famous diaries of American history. In its pages she called her husband “JC” or “Mr. C.”

  “Men were more audaciously wise and witty,” she wrote. “We had an unspoken foreboding it was to be our last pleasant evening.”

  The city had a festive yet anxious air. For Mary there had been teas and dinners all week. She dined with two former governors, a former U.S. senator (who flamboyantly quoted Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake), a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, a former judge, and myriad other scions of the best families at the pinnacle of society, including even a Pinckney—Harriott Pinckney, holder of 343 enslaved Blacks and “one of the last of the 18th century Pinckneys,” Mary wrote. At one supper the fare was “pâté de foie gras, salad, biscuit glacé, and champagne frappé.”

  The usual society quadrille of house visits and return visits, with calling cards passed inward by Black house servants in white gloves, took on a relentless Rome-afire intensity. Carriages moved from house to house driven by enslaved men in scarlet livery, with enslaved boys on the fenders to open gates. Planters who had been wearing ordinary clothing one day turned up the next in elaborate uniforms, red sashes glaring—their “soldier’s toggery,” as Mary put it. With so much tension in the city, she wrote, the atmosphere was “phosphorescent.” The streets were full of soldiers in uniform marching and singing; at night she heard the heavy rumble of ammunition wagons moving over cobbled streets—no one could sleep. “The plot thickens,” she wrote, using a phrase then in common usage but first deployed in a play two centuries earlier. “The air is red-hot with rumors,” she wrote. “The mystery is to find out where these utterly groundless tales originate.”

  After one especially buoyant dinner where talk centered on the latest report that half a dozen U.S. Navy warships had massed in the Atlantic outside the harbor, Mary retreated to her room. “In any stir or confusion, my heart is apt to beat so painfully,” she wrote in her diary. “Now the agony was so stifling—I could hardly see or hear. The men went off almost immediately. And I crept silently to my room, where I sat down to a good cry.”

  On that Thursday, April 11, while Mr. C and his two fellow officers shuttled to and from Sumter with their ultimatums, as rain fell, windows rattled, and men clattered about with their swords and red sashes, and ammunition wagons trundled toward the wharf and nightriders hunted stray Blacks, the fever of anxiety and war lust grew unbearable.

  “Patience oh my soul—” Mary wrote, “if Anderson will not surrender, tonight the bombardment begins.

  “Have mercy upon us, Oh Lord!”

  Later: “I do not pretend to go to sleep. How can I? If Anderson does not accept terms—at four—the orders are—he shall be fired upon.”

  She lay awake. A church bell boomed four times. Silence followed. “I begin to hope,” Mary wrote. At four-twenty, the actual time designated for the first shot, there was again only quiet.

  * * *

  —

  At Sumter, clocks ticked, chronometer hands whirled, as one slow minute passed, then another.

  Part One

  THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS

  (1807–1860)

  Use your utmost efforts to allay all excitement which your principal may labor under; search diligently into the origin of the misunderstanding; for gentlemen seldom insult each other, unless they labor under some misapprehension or mistake; and when you have discovered the original ground or error, follow each movement to the time of sending the note, and harmony will be restored.

  —John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor or Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling, 1858, also known as The Code Duello

  Springfield, Illinois

  Cataclysm

  November 6, 1860

  A cannon fired. Sunrise. A flare of orange and a cumulus of smoke. Then another. Glass shook. Geese took flight. No threat here—it was Election Day, November 6, 1860, six months earlier. The cannon discharge was for the town to wake up and vote. This being Springfield, Illinois, in the heart of farm country in that climactic autumn, nearly everyone was already up, and nearly everyone would vote. It was a four-way race, the outcome uncertain but with Lincoln generally believed to be the frontrunner. If none of the candidates acquired a clear majority of votes, the election would be decided in the House of Representatives.

  With the sound of the morning cannon there arose what one reporter called an “out-door tumult” as people began surging toward the city’s only polling place, on the second floor of the Sangamon County Court House at Sixth and Washington. The owner of a nearby ice cream parlor opened his shop to a group of Republican women who laid out a feast of coffee, sandwiches, oysters, and cake.

  Springfield was Lincoln’s hometown. He walked the five blocks from his house to his campaign office, which, thanks to a courtesy by the governor, was located in the Illinois state capitol in a suite ordinarily occupied by the governor himself. At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.” In Quincy, Massachusetts, Rep. Charles Francis Adams, an abolitionist ally of Lincoln’s and prolific diarist, marveled at how peacefully the day was progressing despite the passions roiling the country. “It is a remarkable idea,” he wrote, “to reflect that all over this broad land at this moment the process of changing the rulers is peacefully going on, and what a change in all probability.”

  A cataclysmic change: If Lincoln won and the Republican Party took control in Washington, it would sweep out the administration of James Buchanan and the proslavery Democratic Party, which had filled most federal posts with men sympathetic to the South and its “peculiar institution.” The Democrats had held almost unshakeable control of both houses of Congress since 1833, at times with stunning majorities. In the latest complete session, which ended in 1859, Democrats held forty-two more House seats than Republicans; in the Senate they had a two-to-one majority. But suddenly Lincoln seemed to have a chance. Conflict within the Democratic Party had caused a rift that led Northern and Southern factions to propose presidential candidates of their own. In addition, a new Constitutional Union Party claiming to seek North-South rapprochement nominated a third candidate. And the Republican Party, fast gaining strength, nominated Lincoln. With four candidates dividing the field, Lincoln’s backers saw a clear path to the White House. The prospect of party change was by itself daunting for the slaveholding South, but the ascent of Lincoln made it terrifying. Many Southerners, egged on by activists known as “fire-eaters,” reviled Lincoln as a fanatical abolitionist whom they imagined to be hell-bent on making Blacks and whites equal in all things—an intolerable prospect, despite Lincoln’s repeated vow not to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. So hated was he that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot. The South’s most radical newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, urged that if Lincoln won, every slaveholding state should secede immediately.

  At about three-thirty p.m. Lincoln strolled across the square to cast his own vote as adoring locals called out his various nicknames:

  Old Abe,

  Uncle Abe,

  Honest Abe,

  Giant Killer.

  This last was an allusion to one of his opponents in the race, Stephen Douglas, a man of diminutive stature but high intellect known to the public and the press as “The Little Giant.”

  A crowd followed. Lincoln made it easy. His praying-mantis frame measured six-four without shoes or hat, yet he wore a black silk stovepipe all the same, and this increased his visible height to about seven feet. He climbed the stairs in a few long strides and approached a window designated for Republican voters. The crowd behind him swelled.

  His private secretary, John Nicolay, recorded the scene in a memorandum that day. The courthouse steps, Nicolay wrote, “were thronged with People, who welcomed him with immense cheering, and followed him in dense numbers along the hall and up stairs into the Court room, which was also crowded. Here the applause became absolutely deafening, and from the time he entered the room and until he cast his vote and again left it, there was wild huzzaing, waving of hats, and all sorts of demonstrations of applause,—rendering all other noises insignificant and futile.”

  At the window, the candidate announced his name, “Abraham Lincoln,” as if the clerk and everyone else in town did not already know him. He dropped his ballot in an adjacent glass bowl. In a demonstration of humility, he first snipped his own name from the paper ballot, so as not to appear to be voting for himself; he otherwise voted a straight Republican ticket. It took him an hour to make his way back downstairs and through the crowd to his office.

  Soon news of the early returns began to arrive by telegraph. This chattering skein of wires—fifty thousand miles of it—had transformed communication. While not quite instantaneous, given the many points where messages had to be transcribed and relayed, it nonetheless passed for miraculous. Messengers brought the latest returns to the campaign office. The mood was subdued. “Lincoln never poured out his soul to any mortal creature at any time,” wrote William H. Herndon, his law partner. “He was the most secretive—reticent—shut-mouthed man that ever existed.” Those who knew him could tell, however, that the suspense was eroding his reserve. “Mr. Lincoln was calm and collected as ever in his life,” a friend and political advisor, Thurlow Weed, said, “but there was a nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraph office entered, that indicated an anxiety within that no coolness from without could repress.”

  By nine p.m. the tension became too great even for the hard-to-ruffle Lincoln. It was full-on dark by then, the streets ill lit and soft from rain. Accompanied by secretary Nicolay and two friends, Lincoln walked over to the telegraph office and by invitation of the operators sat on a sofa near the receivers. Lincoln on a sofa was like a ship’s mast on a barstool, poised in an uneasy equilibrium between relaxation and structural collapse.

  The messages arrived in code, as was the practice of the day. The operator transcribed them onto small pieces of paper the color of mustard. These were immediately snatched from his hands by others now crowding the room and passed along until eventually they reached Lincoln. The news was good and kept getting better. He took Chicago by twenty-five hundred votes; Connecticut by ten thousand; Pittsburgh by at least ten thousand. But the big question was New York.

  First came a cryptic message from the chair of New York’s Republican Party: “The city of New York will more than meet your expectations.”

  Lincoln left the telegraph office but then came back.

  At last the crucial telegram from New York arrived: “We tender you our congratulations upon this magnificent victory.”

  New York City had gone for Lincoln with enough of a majority to win the entire state, a big prize that would garner thirty-five electoral votes. Late in the evening Lincoln learned that he also won Springfield, where all four candidates were popular. He’d won it by twenty-two votes. At which point, as one observer noted, Lincoln at last allowed himself an expression of joy, “a sudden exuberant utterance—neither a cheer nor a crow, but something partaking of the nature of each.”

  And he laughed out loud.

  The laughter did not last long. Nicolay watched him as the enormity of the moment sank in. He had all but won. “It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off.”

  Elsewhere wild rumors circulated: Riots had broken out in New York City; Stephen Douglas was taken hostage by secessionists in Alabama; Washington was on fire. Across the South the most petrifying genre of rumors took root—those indicating that a widespread slave insurrection, the thing Southerners most feared, had begun. Word spread in Texas that abolitionists and enslaved Blacks were plotting the slaughter of white women while their husbands were out voting. For many in the South the election was the crucible event. A Lincoln victory, wrote fire-eater Edmund Ruffin in his diary, “will serve to show whether these Southern States are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved—whether the institution of negro slavery on which the social and political existence of the South rests, is to be secured by our resistance, or to be abolished in a short time.” Ruffin dearly hoped—“most earnestly and anxiously desired”—that Lincoln would win, “because I have hope that at least one state S.C. will secede, and that others will follow.” If the South did not resist, he wrote, “there never will be future maintenance of our rights—and the end of negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions and our fate.”

  In Springfield there was revelry. Lights blazed in the Hall of Representatives in the state capitol building, Nicolay reported to his fiancée, Therena Bates, “and it was filled nearly all night by a crowd shouting, yelling, singing, dancing, and indulging in all sorts of demonstrations of happiness as the news came in.”

  * * *

  —

  Telegram after telegram arrived. By midnight the outcome became certain. It was a strange victory: Lincoln won more of the popular vote than any candidate, more in fact than any president had ever won—nearly 1,866,000 votes—but this was only 40 percent of the national total. With the race split four ways, however, it was more than enough. He took the Electoral College by a wide margin. Even so, the returns offered little hope for bridging the nation’s division. In those few Southern states where he was included on the ballot, he received few votes. In Virginia he won just over 1 percent; in Kentucky, the state of his birth, less than 1 percent.