Before Anderson could reject the offer, as he planned to do, the boat arrived at Sumter with the provisions. Asst. Surgeon Crawford watched its approach and found the ensuing scene amusing. “The boat had hardly touched the wharf before one quarter of beef was on its way to the mess hall,” Crawford wrote. Having learned of Anderson’s intention, Crawford went down to the wharf to try to stop the delivery. “Each man had a vegetable, poor fellows, they had not tasted anything but pork for so long.”

  Crawford ordered the supplies returned to the boat. The meat made it back; the vegetables got away, spirited to the men’s quarters and hidden under pillows, in bedding, in knapsacks.

  Anderson’s rejection of the provisions tickled his men, even though it meant a continuation of tedious meals of salt pork and water. “Anderson showed a good deal of proper spirit on this occasion,” conceded Captain Doubleday. Sumter’s Pvt. Samuel Millens, after detailing for his father the earnest preparations the state was making for attack, added, “Oh—by the by—they took pity on us a few days ago, laboring under the idea that without doubt we were in a starving condition, [and] kindly or contemptuously sent us some fresh meat, but we deeming it inconsistent with our honor to eat their meat to-day, and cut their throats (if forced to it) to-morrow, returned it untouched.”

  Anderson did, however, take this opportunity to request that the state allow the women and children of the fort to be evacuated to New York by steamer. “The compliance with this request,” Anderson wrote, in a letter to Secretary of War Jamison, “will confer a favor upon a class of persons to whom similar indulgences are always granted, even during a siege in time of actual war, and will be duly appreciated by me.” Governor Pickens authorized the evacuation.

  All this mollycoddling infuriated at least one prominent Charlestonian, however. Fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett grew so frustrated that he strode into Governor Pickens’s office and demanded that he immediately authorize the taking of Sumter.

  Pickens and Rhett detested each other, but the governor reacted with forbearance and wit.

  “Certainly, Mr. Rhett; I have no objection!” Pickens replied. “I will furnish you with some men, and you can storm the work yourself.”

  “But, sir, I am not a military man!”

  “Nor I either,” Pickens said, “and therefore I take the advice of those that are!”

  * * *

  —

  All in all, the beef incident was imbued with the South’s peculiar sense of chivalry: The state would be civil, generous, courteous, while also planning to exterminate the garrison with a bombardment on a scale the nation had never seen—akin to serving a man his favorite meal before slipping a noose around his neck. As a Southerner, Anderson understood the rules of honor. He knew that these kindnesses from Pickens meant nothing in terms of the ultimate fate of Anderson’s garrison and the fort. On that score he and his men had no illusions. The state continued to erect and reinforce gun batteries, and to dig entrenchments to allow the passage of troops between the batteries and their quarters. In his letter to War Secretary Holt, Anderson estimated that his little garrison of seventy-five men was now opposed by some two thousand Carolina soldiers.

  * * *

  —

  In Washington, Buchanan’s cabinet experienced yet more upheaval. On January 11, his new treasury secretary, Philip F. Thomas, who had succeeded the departed Howell Cobb, submitted his resignation after just one month on the job, having failed to arrange a bond to pay interest on the national debt.

  Buchanan replaced him with John A. Dix, a former U.S. senator from New York, who as a northern Democrat had supported Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

  Dix was more than a mere stand-in appointed to fill an empty post for the remaining forty-four days of Buchanan’s term. Buchanan considered Dix a friend, and friends were what he needed most. With neither a wife nor close family circle, he grew increasingly lonely amid the mounting turmoil.

  As the secession crisis deepened and talk of civil war became prevalent, Buchanan invited Dix to move into the White House. He needed the company. There, like some ghostly spirit, Buchanan would visit Dix in the night to talk about the national crisis.

  * * *

  —

  After shoveling a little treason, Edmund Ruffin left Charleston and returned to his home in Virginia, where he stayed only briefly. On Monday, January 21, he headed to Richmond to do what he could to foster rebellion among his fellow Virginians. Along the way he learned of Georgia’s secession, which put the dilatory efforts of his home state in even starker relief. Yes, the Virginia legislature had voted to seat a secession convention, set to start early in February, but otherwise Ruffin saw only a wish for delay and a lack of will. He returned home “heartily disgusted.”

  During this time, however, he found his own stature lofted a bit higher by the publication of two positive reviews of his bloodthirsty novel, Anticipations of the Future, in the prestigious De Bow’s Review and the Literary Messenger. “These are almost the first indications I have had that my book had not fallen dead from the press—neither denounced by enemies nor noticed by friends, if not unknown to all.”

  On Monday, January 28, he received the “joyful news” about Louisiana’s secession, which brought the total of seceded states to six. Everything that Ruffin had hoped for seemed to be coming to pass, albeit without the bloodshed that he seemed to crave, and without the participation of Virginia. It was thrilling: A new nation, a Southern empire free of Northern tyranny, was being born. The seceded states were to converge on Montgomery, Alabama, in a week to bind themselves, officially, as a new confederacy and to craft its governing constitution.

  He found it remarkable that the U.S. government had not yet employed military force to impede secession, and attributed this to “the imbecility” of Buchanan’s administration. But Lincoln would soon take office, and when he did, his abolitionist government, as Ruffin described it, would gain full control of all federal arms. By then, Ruffin believed, the South needed to have built as large and united a confederacy as possible with a dozen or more slaveholding states.

  “Under such circumstances,” Ruffin wrote, “it would be a degree of folly or infatuation altogether inconceivable, for the northern section to attempt the coercion and conquest of the south by war.”

  * * *

  —

  At Sumter, heavy wind and rain persisted. It hampered the departure of the fort’s families and deepened the gloom raised by the prospect of their leaving. As always, Asst. Surgeon Crawford kept a close record of the weather:

  Monday, Jan. 21: “Day cold, and wet, rain at night.”

  Tuesday, Jan. 22: “Day wet and cold.”

  Wednesday, Jan. 23: “Rainy and cold—no mail—no news. Sick in my room all day.”

  Friday, Jan. 25: “Rainy and cold.”

  Saturday, Jan. 26: “Rainy and cold.”

  * * *

  —

  On Friday, February 1, a “lighter,” a barge-like vessel used for the transfer of passengers to and from larger ships, took the families across the bay to Charleston. They were allowed to bring their trunks, bedsteads, bedding, and some articles of furniture. They stayed at one of the city’s preeminent hotels, the Mills House, until the storm subsided and their ship, the Marion, a large side-wheeled steamer, could leave for New York. The rough weather continued through the next day, Saturday, with sufficient intensity to halt work at Sumter and at the Carolina batteries. It was suddenly a lot quieter at the fort with no children or women on the grounds, but there was also a sense of relief that at least the families would be safe. Their departure had a further practical benefit in that it reduced demand for the fort’s supply of food, water, candles, and, importantly, soap.

  Rain was still falling as of eleven a.m. on Sunday morning, but the Marion at last departed. Barely visible in the murk and windblown spume, the ship sailed near Sumter and the families gathered on deck. “As they passed the fort outward-bound,” Captain Doubleday wrote, “the men gave them repeated cheers as a farewell, and displayed much feeling; for they thought it very probable they might not meet them again for a long period, if ever.” The men fired a gun in salute.

  Washington

  Dread

  February

  General Scott’s troops and cannon were visible throughout the city, a potent symbol of the Army’s resolve to ensure that the electoral count and certification of Lincoln’s election, set for February 13, would occur without disruption. One of the most common rumors held that the biggest threat came from Baltimore, where six thousand men were reputed to be armed and prepared to act. As the date of the count neared, one hundred police officers from New York and Philadelphia converged on Washington to further ensure its successful completion.

  The city lay below the Mason-Dixon Line within marching range of Virginia and Maryland, and many residents were sympathetic to the South. New defections from the government seemed to take place every day. Half of its 4,470 civil and military employees came from states “where the revolutionary movement was openly advocated and urged,” said Senator Seward. “Disaffection lurked, if it did not openly avow itself, in every department and every bureau, in every regiment and in every legation and consulate from London to Calcutta.”

  Jeremiah Black, secretary of state, wrote to Buchanan that although no hard evidence had yet been discovered of a conspiracy to seize Washington, it was clear “that the possession of this city is absolutely essential to the ultimate design of the secessionists.”

  To Black, a Democrat loyal to the Union, the underlying logic was itself probative. “If they can take it and do not take it,” Black wrote, “they are fools.”

  Washington and Montgomery

  A Solemn Council

  February 4

  As Lincoln prepared for his journey to Washington, he received encouraging news that reinforced his belief that unionism in the northernmost slave states remained strong. On Monday, February 4, a week before his departure, Virginia held an election to choose delegates for a state convention to consider secession, set to convene on February 13, which was also the day the electoral count would be formally certified in Washington. Of the 152 delegates elected, the great majority—80 percent—favored remaining in the Union, though not without qualification. Lincoln’s secretary of state designee, Seward, received a warning that for such support to continue, Republicans would have to “come forward promptly with liberal concessions.” Seward, however, felt renewed confidence. Virginia’s support was just the beginning, he believed; he expected the so-called border states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—likewise to reject secession. Once they did, the Deep South would surely follow; even the seceded states would seek a return to the fold.

  Virginia’s apparent pro-Union leaning provided a much-needed respite from the mounting tension and suspense. In Boston, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., son of the congressman and diarist of the same name, got word of Virginia’s vote on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 5. “I was skating on Jamaica Pond, all by myself,” he wrote in his diary, “when I noticed the throng of skaters flocking together on the further side of the Pond, and almost immediately they began to shout and cheer with all their souls. Some one had come out bringing a paper with fuller and final returns. The tears almost stood in my eyes; and I skated off to be alone, for I realized that the crisis was actually passed.”

  A few days later, Tennessee voters delivered an even more striking affirmation of Lincoln’s and Seward’s belief in the latent pro-unionism of the South when in a statewide referendum they voted not to hold a convention at all. Seward was delighted, according to another Adams son, Henry, twenty-three, private secretary to his father. “The ancient Seward is in high spirits and chuckles himself hoarse with stories,” Henry wrote.

  Meanwhile, 133 delegates from twenty-one states—fourteen free, seven slave—gathered in Washington for a “Peace Convention” to try to find a way out of the secession crisis. This was set to begin on Monday, February 4, but bad weather hampered the travels of many delegates. When they eventually arrived they found a tense city with soldiers, guns, and cannon everywhere and a palpable fear of invasion by rebel forces, which one delegate proclaimed himself “prepared each morning to see.” Buchanan’s attorney general, Edwin Stanton, harbored the private fear that by Inauguration Day the city would be in Southern hands.

  As a display of defiance against unrest, authorities had ordered an American flag flown from the Washington Monument, which at 156 feet was only about 30 percent complete, a stub of blue gneiss granite faced with white marble, surrounded by tumble-down work sheds and scattered pieces of stone. Seward called the flag-raising “more effective than the most eloquent speech,” although skeptics might have been inclined to see the structure below it more as a symbol of failure. Construction of the monument had begun in 1848 with enslaved labor but ceased ten years later, just as America’s sectional crisis neared its peak, and would not resume until 1880. Owing to the use of a different marble upon resumption, the tower’s face would forever after have two tones, inadvertently immortalizing in stone America’s antebellum division.

  At length the full quorum of conference delegates managed to reach Washington and convened at the city’s Willard Hotel in its adjacent Willard’s Dancing Hall. The conference offered hope, however wan, at a time when the crisis increasingly seemed to be lurching toward violence. Buchanan urged both Congress and the seceding states to abstain from taking any actions “to produce a collision of arms” while the conference was in session. Knowing souls understood this plea to be a reflection of his own fervent hope to make it through Inauguration Day without a civil war.

  The delegates were, to put it kindly, an august group, though Horace Greeley was not inclined to kindness when he dubbed it an “Old Gentlemen’s Convention” whose attendees were “political fossils, who would not have been again disinterred” if not for the crisis at hand. Greeley’s nickname stuck. One elderly delegate died during the conference.

  The attendees resolved early on to keep all proceedings secret from the public to avoid the likelihood that conferees would play to the press with overlong speeches and inflammatory remarks. The speeches occurred anyway, day in day out, in a ceaseless grind of words having all the verve of a glacier.

  * * *

  —

  As the Peace Convention doddered on, officials from South Carolina and the other five states that had seceded thus far gathered in Montgomery for a convention of their own, this one to found the Confederate States of America and establish a provisional congress. They designated Montgomery their capital and chose a president for the congress, Howell Cobb, former U.S. secretary of the Treasury.

  Montgomery was a curious choice for a capital. With a total population of 8,843 people, half of whom were enslaved, it barely qualified as a city, though judging by the state capitol building it had high hopes of becoming one. A broad unpaved boulevard, Market Street (now Dexter Avenue), ended at a shallow promontory, Goat Hill, that formed the base of the building, a massive white Greek Revival structure built a decade earlier with six three-story columns, a large dome, and a clock. It was here that delegates from the seceded states met, surrounded by elegant interior woodwork and graceful curving stairways crafted by Horace King, a renowned architect, carpenter, and bridge builder who also happened to be Black and formerly enslaved. The building was situated half a mile from the Alabama River, uphill from a wharf where riverboats unloaded delegates and enslaved Blacks alike.

  A newspaper called the Montgomery Daily Post and subtitled “An Independent South” provided a sense of the commerce that fueled the city. Here were one-inch ads for such things as caskets, carriages, dental services, whiskey, and women’s “dancing pumps.” The Post was given now and then to attempts at humor. What do you call “The Valet of the Shadow of Death?” Why, “The Undertaker,” of course. Out on the street, visitors to Montgomery might encounter an obvious marker of some retail specialty, such as a giant boot at the boot maker’s shop at the corner of Commerce and Market, or the immense gold tooth at the office of Dr. H. Seger, dentist. At Glackmeyer’s Apothecary on Market, under the eagle sign, you could get a cocaine preparation for your hair, or a French pomade, or an elderflower extract for the complexion, or a particularly tantalizing product called “Dupuy’s Kiss-me-Gently.”

  A photograph of Market Street at the time shows two lines of three-story shops and mostly covered sidewalks fronted by drainage ditches receding toward the distant capitol, seemingly afloat in a light haze like some mystical temple from The Arabian Nights. In the foreground are a handful of freight wagons pulled by listless oxen and mules; clusters of men, mostly Black, sit peacefully around the Artesian Basin, a large round cistern on Court Square. William Russell, a correspondent for the Times of London who visited in 1861, found it bleak and desultory. “The streets are very hot, unpleasant, and uninteresting. I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place; it looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”

  The choice of Montgomery did make a certain sense, however, in that it was the center of the domestic slave trade in Alabama and for much of the Deep South. Scores of enslaved Blacks arrived daily by riverboat and by train, and by overland coffles, to be deposited in slave “depots,” or pens, located throughout the city. On Market alone there were nine businesses engaged in trading, auctioning, or investing in slaves, and at least eight pens where men, women, and children alike were stored before sale. A slave pen on South Decatur Street stood just a block from the capitol. Additional depots and trading houses operated from side streets. The city’s slave auctions were typically held at the Artesian Basin, which made slave shopping about as convenient as possible. The state courthouse stood on an adjacent corner for the filing of slave mortgages, probate agreements, and other instruments; nearby stood a row of banks and insurers that specialized in financing the trade, including the founding office of a firm even then called Lehman Brothers. Advertisements in the Montgomery Daily Post touted enslaved people for sale, made available because of deaths, bankruptcies, and other legal actions. One ad offered a distinctly Southern service. Headlined “Negro Dogs,” it was posted by one W. L. Staggers, who specialized in finding escaped Blacks: “I have a first rate pack of Negro Dogs, with which I will hunt for Negroes at five dollars a day, and ten dollars for each Negro I succeed in securing.”