Commissioner Crawford found a hot city made anxious by anticipation of Lincoln’s inaugural. It had been a week of “unexampled warm weather,” observed diarist and congressman Charles Francis Adams that day; strong winds had raised clouds of dust from the city’s dry, unpaved streets. The city was full of new arrivals hoping to witness so climactic an inauguration. “I was obliged to walk home a third time,” wrote Adams, “as the Omnibuses were crowded, so I got back late, and very tired.”

  * * *

  —

  Edmund Ruffin’s disgust at Virginia’s continued reluctance to secede deepened to the point where he felt he could no longer live in the state. In his diary he made a vow: “I will be out of Va before Lincoln’s inauguration, and so will avoid being, as a Virginian, under his government even for an hour. I, at least, will become a citizen of the seceded Confederate States, and will not again reside in my native state, nor enter it except to make visits to my children, until Va shall also secede, and become a member of the Southern Confederacy.”

  True to his word, at three o’clock Saturday afternoon, March 2, Ruffin left Richmond for Charleston, South Carolina, and arrived thirty-two and a half hours later, on Sunday, March 3.

  This city, at least, was primed for war. Crews of enslaved Blacks and privileged white volunteers continued to erect and expand gun batteries and to reinforce the newly seized federal forts, Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. Volunteer soldiers marched and sang. Draft horses labored through the streets hauling gun carriages and wagons filled with ammunition to the city’s wharf for transport to the batteries rising on the harbor islands. Where once enslaved people from Africa arrived by the hundreds, bewildered and ill after enduring the horrors of the Middle Passage, their captive descendants now shouldered barrels of gunpowder, iron shielding, and heavy timbers. Steamers showing the palmetto flag kept watch on Sumter, whose sail-sized U.S. flag flew as ever in a continued affront to the honor of the South, an indignity to be borne, officials vowed, only a little while longer.

  Ruffin checked into the Charleston Hotel, which hummed with talk about what the next day—Inauguration Day—would bring.

  London

  On the Scent

  March 3

  Even from his distant vantage, John Delane, editor of the Times of London, sensed that political conflict in America had reached an intensity that could erupt in violence. This would, of course, constitute a very good story for his readers, who might take a certain pleasure in seeing England’s wayward offspring bruised by a rebellion of their own.

  He decided it was time to dispatch the paper’s celebrated reporter, Sir William Howard Russell, to America to serve as its special correspondent “in observing the rupture between the Southern States and the rest of the Union, consequent upon the election of Mr. Lincoln and the advent of the Republicans to power.” Russell was well known around the world, especially for his reporting on the Crimean War, which brought to life for readers the doomed British attack that inspired Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

  Delane’s instincts had first been piqued several weeks earlier when he initially suggested the assignment to Russell, but the correspondent did not immediately accept. His wife’s health was fragile, his children were growing fast, and over the prior seven years he had been, as he put it, “constantly in exile in the Crimea, Russia, India, and Italy.” He had settled into a happy domestic rhythm. “My life was at that time very pleasant,” he wrote. At his social club, the Garrick, he consorted with the likes of Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope. He knew little about the unfolding crisis in America, though he had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and portions of speeches by various Southern firebrands that had been reprinted in the London press. One evening, at the Garrick, he told Thackeray of his reluctance to take on the assignment. “You must go,” Thackeray told him. “It will be a great opportunity! As to waiting till you understand the political questions, you will never do it here! You must go out and see them at work on the spot.”

  Russell accepted, and on Sunday, March 3, sailed from Queensland, Ireland, aboard the steamship Arabia. His fellow passengers included several wealthy Southerners, among them a former member of the U.S. Legation in St. Petersburg, Russia, who had quit to ally himself with the Confederacy, and a U.S. Army colonel, Robert S. Garnett of Virginia, who planned to resign his own commission and then join the Confederate army. The colonel proved to be a living primer on that mythic creature, the Southern planter. “He laughed to scorn the doctrine that all men were born equal in the sense of all men having equal rights,” Russell wrote in his diary. “Some were born to be slaves—others to follow useful mechanical arts—the rest were born to rule and to own their fellow men.” To Colonel Garnett, slavery was anything but evil. “Divine institution”—the colonel declared—“an Abolitionist opposes the laws of God himself!” He loathed Yankees. “I would die a hundred times to keep them out!” As it happened, a centile of his wish would be fulfilled five months later when he became the first Confederate general killed in the coming war.

  The Arabia was considered one of the fastest ships afloat, but the voyage still took fourteen days, during which Russell’s conversations with the Southerners aboard (including another planter, from Louisiana, who owned five hundred slaves) and the arrival of a large shipment of newspapers delivered by pilot boat had given him a thorough education in the unfolding crisis. As best he could tell, it distilled to a single question: Who had a right to possess two federal properties, Fort Pickens in Florida, and Fort Sumter in South Carolina?

  “Under the circumstances every one is asking what the Government is going to do,” Russell wrote in his diary. “The Southern people have declared they will resist any attempt to supply or reinforce the garrisons and in Charleston, at least, have shown they mean to keep their word. It is a very strange situation. The Federal Government, afraid to speak and unable to act, is leaving its soldiers to do as they please.”

  Part five

  COERCION

  (March 4–March 29, 1861)

  The challengee has no option when negotiation has ceased, but to accept the challenge.

  —The Code Duello

  Washington

  Mystic Chords

  March 4

  The city was oddly quiet. Shops were closed, flags flew from buildings, but there was an almost taciturn feel to the day, according to journalist Henry Villard. He attributed this to the fact that over the years, with Southerners filling the government’s myriad patronage positions, Washington had become very much a Southern city. Despite the 1850 federal ban on commercial slave trading within its boundaries, slavery as an institution clearly still thrived. Washington had about half the enslaved Blacks it did in the early 1800s, but residents still owned more than three thousand, meaning roughly one in twenty of the city’s population was enslaved. “The city itself indicated, by the scantiness of festive array, that the mass of the inhabitants were hostile to the new rule,” Villard wrote.

  Washington’s divided loyalties made it a canvas for the tensions throughout the nation. “We are now in such a state,” General Scott observed, “that a dog-fight might cause the gutters of the capital to run with blood.”

  * * *

  —

  Lincoln slept badly. He woke at five a.m. to weather that was at first cloudy and raw, with a brisk wind blowing from the northwest. Rain threatened, but only a few drops fell, not enough to tamp the dust that billowed from cross streets. Anxious still about his speech, Lincoln asked his son Robert to read it aloud.

  Lincoln had so far said nothing to Seward about the senator’s last-minute refusal to become secretary of state. Only now, on the morning of Inauguration Day, did Lincoln reply. “It is the subject of most painful solicitude with me,” Lincoln wrote, “and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply inlisted”—Lincoln’s spelling—“in the same direction.” Lincoln asked Seward to reconsider and to send an answer by nine o’clock the next morning.

  President Buchanan drove to the Willard and met briefly with Lincoln; the two then emerged from the Fourteenth Street side of the hotel and were joined by two senators, one from Oregon, the other from Maryland. They all climbed into Buchanan’s carriage and, with a military escort and mounted cavalry at each side, began the nearly two-mile drive southeast along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. A procession followed comprised of judges, clergy, diplomats, soldiers, members of the Peace Convention, and, as the New-York Times put it, “a host of minor great men.” A cheerfully decorated vehicle carried thirty-four little girls who represented the states of the Union, even those that had seceded. There had been a brief debate about whether Lincoln’s carriage should have its top raised or lowered. With the recollection of his secret entry into Washington still sharp in his mind, Lincoln insisted that the top be down.

  As the carriage moved through the city, the Capitol directly ahead grew steadily larger, the building’s disarray more evident. It was anything but complete, an aborted wedding cake interrupted at the third tier. Cranes and scaffolding covered its north face. It seemed a metaphor for larger forces at play. The Union was literally falling apart. Virginia tottered, its convention waiting to hear what Lincoln had to say before taking a final vote on whether to secede. The man next to him, the ineffectual James Buchanan, had let all this come to pass without making any substantive effort to stop it.

  All Buchanan wanted to do now was go home to Wheatland. He could not wait to leave the White House.

  * * *

  —

  That morning, General Scott paid a brief visit to William Seward’s home before the procession to the Capitol set out, and assured him that his troops had been posted “quietly and unostentatiously.” Seward’s son Frederick found otherwise. “In point of fact, there were squads of riflemen on housetops, along the avenue”—Pennsylvania Avenue—“and at the windows of the wings of the Capitol, and under the steps leading to the platform, while batteries of light artillery were ready for immediate service to quell any street riot.” Soldiers on foot and on horseback raised tempests of dust and seemed omnipresent.

  At the Capitol, before the inauguration ceremony began, Buchanan took Lincoln aside. Private secretary John Hay watched. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weather-beaten head. Every word must have its value at such an instant. Buchanan said: ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that of the left.’ ”

  The ceremony was to be held on the East Portico, where senators, representatives, members of the diplomatic corps, and the Supreme Court justices now gathered. Lincoln stepped to the podium; before him spread an audience estimated to number anywhere from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand people. The dreary morning had given way to sunshine and heat, with temperatures expected to surpass eighty degrees. Lincoln wore a new suit made of black cashmere and a black top hat of silk, and, in an uncharacteristically fussy sartorial diversion from his norm, carried a black walking stick with a gold tip. “Mr. Buchanan looked old and worn out,” wrote diarist Charles Francis Adams, “whilst Mr. Lincoln looked awkward and out of place.”

  In accord with the custom prevailing at the time, Lincoln would give his speech before taking the oath of office, administered by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision; only then would Lincoln officially become president. For a moment he struggled to find a place to rest his hat. Stephen Douglas, his most bitter antagonist in the presidential election and in the Senate race before that, took the hat with a smile and held it for him.

  That Lincoln had survived to this point was to many a surprise and a relief; but now anxiety shifted to the matter of the speech itself. In Lexington, Virginia, a pro-Union lawyer, James Davidson, wrote to a friend, “I have been looking towards Washington all day—this momentous day. Whilst I feel that Lincoln’s message will be pacific, yet I am much worried.”

  Oddly enough the first six words Lincoln spoke were among the most heavily cheered: “Fellow citizens of the United States.” It was “the signal for prolonged applause,” observed the Times correspondent, “the good Union sentiment thereof striking a tender chord in the popular breast.”

  In its final form, tempered by the suggestions of Seward and Orville Browning, Lincoln’s speech carved a line between conciliation and provocation and seemed to make no one happy, though his closing paragraph, with its mystic chords and better angels, moved many in the audience to tears and would be largely responsible for lodging his address in the pantheon of the greatest speeches ever delivered. Abolitionists and the most ardent Republicans felt he had gone too far in placating the South. Frederick Douglass found the speech disheartening. “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell,” he said, “but the result shows that we have merely a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends his knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.”

  Only as Lincoln spoke did Seward realize the extent to which he had accepted his revisions. But the speech in its final form did nothing to soothe secessionist ire. One key member of the ongoing Virginia Convention, Robert Young Conrad, a Unionist, said its effect was “like an earthquake.” Confederate officials reached the immediate conclusion that it signaled hostility toward the South. Just after hearing Lincoln speak, Texas senator Louis Wigfall, never much inclined toward equanimity, telegraphed from Washington:

  “Inaugural means war.”

  But Lexington lawyer Davidson, after reading the complete speech in a newspaper, took a more judicious view. He saw it as “a somewhat Jesuitical striving to please both sides” and to avoid belligerence. “Mark it,” he wrote to a friend. “He don’t intend seriously to attempt Coercion. He knows it will fail if attempted and could serve no good purpose.”

  Davidson told his friend about a conversation he’d had with Lincoln toward the end of the Washington Peace Convention in which Davidson tried to ascertain Lincoln’s attitude toward the use of force.

  “There will be no necessity for coercion,” Lincoln told him. “That word is misunderstood and misinterpreted. No armies ever will be marched through the Southern States.”

  Davidson, hoping to draw Lincoln out, said, “Suppose South Carolina—”

  Lincoln cut him off. “If I am struck at, may I not strike back?”

  Davidson hoped to provoke Lincoln into revealing more. “Aggression,” Davidson said, “might change the case.”

  “If we have a government let us know it,” Lincoln said, playfully (in Davidson’s judgment). “If we can’t keep the family together, might it not be as well to break up housekeeping?”

  The two shook hands. “Mr. President,” Davidson told him, “we now return to our mountains. Farewell! The question of Peace or War is in your hands.”

  “Farewell,” Lincoln said, bowing his tall frame. “There will be no war.”

  * * *

  —

  The Lincolns took possession of the White House. As Buchanan exited, he told Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.” The thirty-four girls now paused at the door and sang “Hail Columbia,” at the time widely considered to be America’s unofficial national anthem.

  That night the Lincolns attended the Inaugural Ball, held in a temporary building erected for the event behind city hall. “It was very large and quite pretty,” observed diarist Charles Francis Adams, “and every body expected it would be densely crowded. But the fact was quite otherwise. The numbers were just sufficient to give no appearance of nakedness.”

  The Lincolns arrived late, which struck Adams as being socially inept; news reports put their arrival at eleven o’clock. “They are evidently wanting in all the arts to grace their position,” Adams wrote. “He is simple, awkward, and hearty. She is more artificial and pretentious.”

  Frederick Seward found the event oddly subdued. “There was no crowd, little dancing,” he reported, “and one might almost say, no gayety.” In Montgomery, Mary Chesnut learned that the ball was attended by Mr. and Mrs. George Parker, whom the New York Herald identified as members of “the elite” of Washington society. Mary snorted metaphorically. “The Parkers,” she wrote, “were our grocers in Washington—and they were spoken of as the Elite—poor Washington.”

  Stephen A. Douglas, who had graciously held Lincoln’s hat earlier in the day, danced a quadrille with Mrs. Lincoln.

  The president left the ball at about one a.m.; his wife, always game for a party, stayed on.

  Charleston and Montgomery

  Sickened

  March 4

  In Charleston, Edmund Ruffin read the inaugural in segments as each installment arrived by telegraph at the office of the Mercury, which posted them on its bulletin board. A large and excited crowd read along with him.

  “It settles the question that there must be war,” he wrote in his diary that day. Like so many in the South, Ruffin saw in the address what he had primed himself to see. He noted that Confederate General Beauregard had just taken charge of Charleston’s defense. Ruffin expected Beauregard to attack Sumter and hoped that Lincoln would trigger an immediate conflict by launching an expedition to send troops and supplies to the fort. “I earnestly hope,” he wrote, “that this may be the beginning, and if war is to occur, that such attempt to reinforce may be made before another week passes.”