The Star of the West was a large vessel and presented an easy target. That the guns failed to do much damage could have been due to the inexperience of the fifty or so cadets who manned them, on duty only since New Year’s Day. In the Citadel’s lexicon, these were “first-classmen,” meaning seniors, and “second-classmen,” juniors. One observer noted that the battery appeared to fire wildly.

  Two guard steamers approached, one towing an armed schooner, a confiscated Union cutter. The hidden battery continued to fire, and soon guns at Fort Moultrie began firing as well.

  The Star of the West raised and lowered its U.S. flag in an apparent effort to get Fort Sumter’s attention.

  * * *

  —

  At Sumter, Doubleday woke Anderson and told him of the ship’s arrival and the attack from the hidden battery. Anderson ordered him to have the garrison drummers beat the “long roll” to summon the troops to their posts. This was a blood-spurring tattoo consisting of briskly repeated beats. Anderson also ordered Doubleday to station gunnery crews at the cannon on the fort’s parapets.

  In minutes the guns were ready. A corporal, Francis J. Oakes, stood by a howitzer with its lanyard in his hand, ready to fire.

  Anderson saw the ship lower then raise its flag and, intending to reply, ordered the fort’s flag dipped as well, but its halyard had become tangled around the flagstaff and could not be moved.

  As Anderson watched the ship approach, the Moultrie guns began to fire, prompting Sumter’s Lt. Jefferson Davis to suggest that the fort open fire on Moultrie. This, he argued, would be more fruitful than attempting to silence the hidden battery on Morris. Implicit in the lieutenant’s remarks was the assumption that Anderson would indeed order Sumter’s guns to fire. How could he not? A ship clearly flying the American flag was now under brisk attack by the forces of a rebel state.

  For Anderson, this was a difficult moment. His affinity for the South and his duty to the U.S. Army created a conundrum that offered no clear solution. He had the guns and the authority to fire if he wished, and his sense of duty required that this insult to the American flag be redressed. At the same time he had good reason to resent the position in which he now found himself, for he had received no official word that a relief ship was on its way, let alone that it would be so vulnerable a vessel.

  To fire, he knew, was to ignite the war everyone feared. The state’s forces—planters, planters’ sons; the chivalry—held themselves to an almost cult-like sense of honor that would leave them no choice but to fire back with every gun at their disposal. They seemed, in fact, to be hoping for just such a pretext.

  But Anderson’s sense of duty was exacting. He felt no loyalty toward the North; he loathed the abolitionist fanatics of New England. But he had sworn fealty to the United States Army.

  Anderson ordered Lieutenant Davis to report to the lower tier of the fort and prepare two of the big guns aimed at Moultrie.

  Another lieutenant, R. K. Meade, one of Sumter’s engineers and a native of Virginia, urged Anderson to hold fire, lest he trigger all-out civil war.

  * * *

  —

  Aboard the Star of the West, Lieutenant Woods, commander of the Army forces aboard, assessed the situation he now faced. Cannonballs were hissing past; the harbor steamer towing the armed cutter was fast approaching; the tide had already fallen three feet. If the Star of the West were to retreat it would have to do so soon, before the receding tide made it impossible to escape the harbor. If the ship stalled at the bar, or worse, ran aground, it would be an easy prize and an even more humiliating loss for the Union.

  “Finding it impossible to take my command to Fort Sumter,” Lieutenant Woods wrote, “I was obliged most reluctantly to turn about.”

  Owing to the ebb tide, the ship retreated with caution, sounding all the way. The firing from the cadets’ battery continued but did no damage, and soon the shots began falling into the sea behind the ship. At the bar, the keel touched bottom “two or three times,” according to Lieutenant Woods, but the ship managed to cross safely. Captain McGowan immediately turned north and set a course to New York. A steamer from Charleston followed for several hours, then turned back.

  The two hundred soldiers aboard the Star had been below decks the whole time, never in view; the ship carried no cannon. If secrecy had prevailed, the ship very likely could have entered the harbor without challenge, just another merchant vessel plying the port. But as Anderson had warned, secrecy was impossible.

  Lieutenant Woods would write in his official report, “From the preparations that had been made for us I have every reason to believe the Charlestonians were perfectly aware of our coming.”

  * * *

  —

  The U.S. Navy’s Brooklyn, meanwhile, missed the entire show. The ship searched for the Star of the West but never found her and eventually sailed home.

  Mississippi

  The True Enemy

  January 9

  The secession of South Carolina, coupled with Major Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter, energized the advocates of disunion throughout the Deep South. Any indecision, any thought of pausing to give Lincoln a chance, was swept away by a surge of enthusiasm for independence from the hated North and an end to the sneering intrusion of Northern abolitionists. News of the Star of the West relief attempt would only intensify the South’s anger.

  On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. The delegates were very clear about their motivation.

  “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” they wrote in their official declaration. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

  The delegates were convinced that Lincoln and the Republican Party planned to abolish slavery. “Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union,” the declaration warned; secession was their only alternative. “It is not a matter of choice,” they said, “but of necessity.”

  A howl of indignation and hurt feelings rose from each of the fifteen claims in the declaration, each a single sentence long. All attributed the state’s action to the Union’s enduring “hostility” to slavery. The declaration depicted this hostility as a corporeal villain, an “it” having a multitude of destructive powers. “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst,” one claim asserted. The next: “It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and the schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.”

  It was an implacable enemy. “It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.”

  The pace at which the Union began to disintegrate was breathtaking, and Lincoln had yet to set foot in Washington.

  * * *

  —

  Buchanan did nothing. On that Wednesday, he delivered an address that by its title, “Message on Threats to the Peace and Existence of the Union,” seemed to signal some form of decisive action. Instead, he offered what sounded very much like a capitulation.

  After describing the damage the crisis had done to American prosperity and reiterating his belief that no state had a right to secession, Buchanan essentially threw up his hands and announced that the conflict between the states “has assumed such vast and alarming proportions as to place the subject entirely above and beyond Executive control.” It was up to Congress to save the day, he said. He did, however, assert a federal right to use force against “those who assail the property of the Federal Government,” calling that right “clear and undeniable.” When he referred to Major Anderson’s move from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, he called him “that gallant officer,” drawing both hisses and applause from the spectator gallery.

  He closed his address on a wistful note. “I feel that my duty has been faithfully, though it may be imperfectly, performed; and, whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.”

  Washington

  A Wife’s Disappointment

  January 9–12

  With crisis came suspicion. In Washington the House established a new “Select Committee” comprised of five members given more or less unlimited power to investigate potential acts of treason within the government. The “Committee of Five,” also called the “Treason Committee,” included two Republicans, two pro-Union Democrats from the North, and one Southerner, a Democrat from North Carolina.

  The committee soon found itself the recipient of confidential intelligence from an unusual source in the highest echelons of Buchanan’s government: his newly appointed attorney general, Edwin M. Stanton. Once the committee convened, Stanton began providing clandestine information on a daily basis to its two Republican members. He left unsigned messages in secret places, including hollow cavities in trees. The members would retrieve these late at night, read them, then put the messages back where they found them. “There is a Northern traitor in the cabinet,” read one such message. “Arrest him tonight. Pensacola has been given up. Stop him before it is too late.”

  The “traitor” in question was Buchanan’s secretary of the Navy, Isaac Toucey, whom the Treason Committee called to appear at two closed-door hearings. Stanton’s suspicions of him were aroused after the Navy allowed Southern forces to seize the federal navy yard in Pensacola, Florida, without resistance. (A nearby federal fortress in the Gulf of Mexico, Fort Pickens, remained in federal possession.) Subsequent testimony revealed that the Navy had twenty-eight ships tied up in U.S. ports, of which none was ready for immediate service, despite a $646,000 fund specially allocated for ship repair. Overriding the objections of its one Southern member, the committee proposed that the House formally censure the Navy secretary. The House, where Republicans now held a majority, did so by a vote of 95 to 62.

  The Treason Committee then turned to matters more grave. Under a resolution proposed by Senator Seward of New York (Lincoln’s pick for secretary of state), the committee was directed to investigate a widely rumored threat to the city of Washington by Southern forces hoping to seize the government. The fear of such a coup became pervasive, stoked by wildly inflammatory reports and rumors. A Richmond newspaper came right out and demanded that Maryland and Virginia take steps to block Lincoln’s inauguration. The South-leaning New York Day Book, breathing fire, called upon the South to “save the republic of Washington from the taint of n—rism;—they must expel Lincoln and his free-n—r horde from the federal district.”

  As Lincoln’s inauguration approached, the rumors gained detail, if not necessarily credence. Seward, apparently acting on information supplied by Attorney General Stanton, notified Lincoln that “a plot is forming to seize the capital on or before the 4th of March.” Inauguration Day.

  The ubiquity of these rumors, and their increasingly credible sources—like Dorothea Dix and Philadelphia railroad executive Samuel Felton—prompted Commanding Gen. Winfield Scott to order over six hundred troops to take up positions in the city and to make their presence visible. This seemed to have a positive effect. Rumors of insurrection faded.

  The troops remained, however. The counting of the electoral vote had yet to occur.

  * * *

  —

  In Congress, every day brought rhetorical combat, with “Black” Republicans attacking slavery, Southern Democrats threatening secession. The most mundane procedural act could unleash cataracts of words in hours-long speeches, as senators and representatives sought fresh opportunities to irritate one another by picking at old issues that had inflamed debate for months. Verbal scuffles were routine, with otherwise sober and dignified members of Congress flinging petty procedural motions at one another like handfuls of gravel.

  Mississippi’s Sen. Jefferson Davis, who had not yet resigned his seat, threatened bloodshed: “masses of men sacrificed, to the demon of civil war.” But his Republican counterpart, Senator Seward, considered by many to be a radical abolitionist and the man who would likely be the real leader in the new administration, surprised everyone, to the great disappointment of his own wife.

  In a speech on January 11, the day after Davis spoke, Seward addressed what he perceived to be the South’s main sources of discontent. He affirmed that how any state viewed its property, whether human or otherwise, was up to the state itself, and condemned Northern personal-liberty laws that interfered with that right. Further, he declared his willingness to vote for an amendment to the Constitution that would bar any future attempt to empower Congress “to abolish or interfere with slavery in any State.”

  The speech shocked Carl Schurz, a German-born lawyer prominent in Republican politics. “What do you think of Seward?” Schurz wrote to his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power.”

  In a letter to Seward a week later, Lincoln wrote, “Your recent speech is well received here; and, I think, is doing good all over the country.” But in fact, Lincoln found the conciliatory nature of the speech disturbing. In remarks to a visitor that made their way into the New York Herald, Lincoln said, “I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right; because, whatever I might think of the merit of the various propositions before Congress, I should regard any concession in the face of menace the destruction of the government itself.”

  Seward’s wife, also displeased, was more direct in her criticism. “My dearest Henry,” she wrote. “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best.” His friends, she wrote, would have preferred “that you had not spoken at all.” She found the speech morally offensive and had no reservations about telling him so. “Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the Liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right—The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a Law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive—giving half of the Frontier of a free Country to the curse of Slavery—these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.”

  She assured him that she understood the gravity of the moment. “No one can dread War more than I do—for 10 years I have prayed earnestly that our Son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to-day assent to the perpetuation or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness.” Her conscience, she said, impelled her to warn him that he risked having his name “execrated by the humane and generous.”

  Then, overnight, came regret. The next day she dispatched a brief note. “My dear Henry, The letter I sent yesterday was written under the influence of a violent headache which had affected me all night—I presume it was exaggerated—I wish you would destroy it.”

  She retracted nothing, however, and Seward kept the letter intact.

  * * *

  —

  What Seward had not addressed in his speech, and perhaps did not truly understand, was that at this point in the crisis, the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons. Yet the chivalry, thanks to Edmund Ruffin, James Hammond, and others, had persuaded themselves of a different reality: Slavery was a positive good; it was endorsed by the Bible and by anthropological observation; even two famed Northern anthropologists, Louis Agassiz and Charles Morton, both of Harvard, no less, had proclaimed on the basis of purportedly scientific research that the Black race was not only inferior, but a different species altogether. If slavery was good, then slaveowners were good, and anyone who said otherwise abraded their honor, something no Southerner could forgive.

  Lincoln had only a partial grasp of this reality. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended,” Lincoln wrote in a December letter to Alexander “Little Ellick” Stephens, the Georgia congressman, “while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”

  But it was here in this clash of moral perception that hatred simmered and violence became imaginable. More than simply a “substantial difference,” it was a chasm that even the most generous package of concessions could never bridge.

  Fort Sumter

  Forbearance

  January 9–12

  As Major Anderson and his men watched from the Sumter parapet, the Star of the West, under fire from Fort Moultrie, made a long sweeping turn and headed back toward the Atlantic. Sumter’s cannon were loaded and manned; gunners stood ready, grasping the lanyards that would fire the guns.